For lack of a better word, I'm going to call this the over-association fallacy. The over-association fallacy is when you think "I must have X, Y is one way to get X, therefore I must have Y."
This post is a classical example of the over-association fallacy. What the author really wants is the freedom to experiment, and he concludes that you can't have this in a big company.
However, there are plenty of big companies that give you that freedom, and plenty of small companies that don't. The smallest company I ever worked for had 4 people, but the CEO was an extreme micromanager who layered huge amounts of work on his employees and was terrified of innovation. In contrast, I had a huge amount of freedom to play around at a giant bank, because I automated all my work and my manager only cared about the quality of work (not how many hours I spent.) The result of this playing around helped me learn a lot and save the company millions of dollars.
So keep in mind what you really want. Don't avoid big companies, avoid places that don't let you learn anything.
People don't know what they want, but they sure as hell know what they don't want. I think this ties both to businesses (specifically startups and what they focus their efforts on) as well as employees and entrepreneurs themselves.
To quote Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."
Additionally, you can move around without leaving the company. Why is that important? Check the graph from the long term unemployment article[1]. Personally, I like to move every 2 years, so that's kind of important.
I'm going to write about something of personal interest now. Downvote away. It's a bit UK specific.
Something I've noticed, looking at the people I graduated with 8 years ago, is that the ones who have done well went to work for large companies. They did a grad scheme, stayed in the role after it had finished, and just sat tight, maybe moving a couple of times within the company.
They earn a multiple of those that didn't - the PHDs, sure that's expected, but also much more than the freelancers and those who have hopped between small programming houses. Certainly more than people who did something fashionable, like fashion, the arts, or teaching English abroad.
The funny thing is that those left behind don't have an opportunity to get on that gravy train now. Grad programs are for recent graduates. Experienced hires from companies the recruiter has heard of get first place.
Another effect (an this is UK specific) has been in mortgages. Since 2008, you need to save maybe 70k dollars in order to get one. That's a full years pay for a software engineer. 4 if you count tax. But rents are double or triple mortgage interest, so unless you already have one, you won't save that.
So we have this widening wealth gap between those who got onto, and stayed in, a graduate program 2008, and the rest. It will really be quite something in future.
The BBC did some analysis where they collected data about the population (wealth, cultural signifier), and clustered it. They found 7 distinct clusters, and decided to invent a new 'social class', called 'emergent service workers'. This turned out to mean 'young people who graduated since 2008'. I suspect they will be a generation of lifetime renters, doing similar jobs for a little less money than their peers 2 years older (starting salary has a compounded effect, and is suppressed by maybe 1/4 right now).
I don't really see this in the press. As usual, they don't notice things.
We live as ever in interesting times.
[1]http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/LongTer... [2] www.bbc.co.uk/labuk/experiments/class
For what is worth, I noticed that also (not in the UK, but somewhere else in Europe). My ex-wife, a psychology major, managed to get hired into a big oil company doing procurement work (yes, they were that desperate at hiring people) around 2005-2006. Of course, in the meantime she has gathered a ton of experience and she'd have no problems whatsoever of picking another similar job at another big company.
For comparison, looking at kids aged 22 to 24 who have just graduated it seems like they're, well, fucked. Nobody will hire them in a big company for lack of work experience and they can't get any experience because nobody wants to hire them.
IMO this makes a strong case for working with small companies. Big companies are relatively risk averse and will look for external validation of the candidate - certifications, degrees, impressive prior experience, etc.
It's much easier for a young person lacking experience today to approach a small business and successfully pitch them on an internship or some contract work. A large corporation is too hamstrung by HR, by policy, and by its own approval chain, to take advantage of things like this.
Would you relate your situation to the Silicon Valley, where majority of new tech companies have been created? How would you compare situation of your friends to situation of people who joined Google 15 years ago, or Facebook 8 years ago?
I would bet that in UK ratio of revenue of big companies to small companies is much higher than in Silicon Valley.
It is true that a lot of London money is made in finance, but we also have some giant engineering companies and subsidiaries, such as Rolls Royce, BAE. Sony, Huawei, IBM, Siemens, and others have large research presences in the suburbs, because engineers are cheaper here than in America, but we have more aggressive IP laws than China or India.
If you want a big company to get lost in as an engineer or project manager, there is no lack of them.
Working at a startup, hoping for an IPO, is a high risk high reward gamble. People choose to do it because it gives them agency over their work and futures in a way that being part of a big machine does not, but most fail, and we should be aware when we take a risk what that risk is, hence my post.
Taking advantage of London's competitive advantage in finance, a lot of financial startups have won really big, setting up major energy trading exchanges and brokerages, though you wouldn't hear of them outside the industry.
I'm more cynical about the current wave of London web startups.
Would I suggest a young Londoner goes to work at a startup? This city has a bit of an unpaid internships culture, and I fear they would get the same experience as at a larger company, for less CV impact and no money. Get into computer security at KPMG, you'll get rich.
If you really care about interesting work and colleagues, there never a cut and dried answer about small vs large organizations. Ever.
I suppose I came out a bit aggressive on the fact that it's about small vs. large organizations only, but this was just my own personal opinion based on (only) a few years of experience in the field.
I'm not ruling out large organizations, and large organizations can also be all up for the new and interesting stuff, but that's not the case in the bureaucracy companies (which I'm ruling out) where everyone is stuck to the standard in-house CMS, programming language, or framework.
There's always exceptions to every rule. I agree with that.
So is the vast majority of boring technical work.
Unless you are simply looking to undergo a form of endurance training.
In a company with 10,000 employees and 5 C-level employees, not everybody gets a shot at a C-level position.
In a small company you might just get a position with high responsibility (if little status) that will get you ready for a high responsibility position with more status elsewhere.
I once worked at a web design shop where three salespeople who dressed normally, a few goth designers and programmers, and me who dressed "business goth" at the time. (I got along really well with everybody.) The production people got out their anger against the world by designing web sites with black backgrounds for everything. They would have put black text on a black background if it would have gotten past QA.
I've been contracting with many big corporations and I've found many where the people are a delight to work with -- I'd imagine these people are happy.
Remember also that big organizations are divided into smaller units which are further subdivided. These can have radically different cultures.
A major University I know of has many IT cultures.
The central IT organization is a disaster, although I know many people who've found comfortable places in it. If you try to get something done by going through official channels this has a 25-40% chance of working.
If you have a large rolodex of people you know there, however, you can guess who might know who to call to fix the problem, and eventually find that person, naming by name all of the people who helped you find them.
Then I get off the phone and I'm like "damn... I got this guy to change the firewall settings for the campus and how does he know who I am?"
I was dealing with another major IT organization and tried to compress the schedule using the same technique. Well, he called his boss, and his boss called my boss, and we got it done.
There are so many companies out there with so many parts that there's very possibly some position you could stand to do.
Their home pages (https://medium.com) states "Sharing ideas and experiences moves humanity forward" which sounds really nice, but still tells me absolutely nothing about what the platform actually is/does.
Medium only comes with a simple editor with minimal formatting options and you can push your posts into "Collections", by either yourself or by other people. With that you can create lists of articles about things that are related to each other.
I only just got into it, so I can't really say what the main focus is, but that's what I think.
I'm really not trying to hate on Medium - it looks really clean, but I'm just trying to figure out it's placement in the content publishing space.
We don't get a single qualified applicant. We use Ruby and Javascript, it's a ~ 25 person company so you can make a difference, you can work on iOS or Android stuff. If you only know a different programming language, we'll still hire you and let you learn if you can prove you're competent.
We're not silicon valley or a 'cool' city, but we're near a few state universities. I guess people would rather sit in a cube, in a suit, while they work on legacy internal apps in VB and .Net for a cold, dark corporation and wait 20 minutes each morning in line at the security gate just to get on the damn property.
Small companies aren't nirvana, and if there are few small companies, you're taking a big risk that you're stepping into an organization where the owner's dumb nephew will be made an SVP over you. In the valley, you jump ship. In the "company town", you need to uproot and move.
Defense contractors are a bit of an oddity, though. Its a quasi-government job, overall the most stable private sector employment, and has excellent benefits. Someone starting at my former employer out of undergrad today does have a reasonable chance of retiring from there. It seems like the workforce is slowly distilling down to those for whom such old-style employment is highly desirable.
[1] Its slowly changing, but it seems to be mostly B2B services, marketing and advertising shops.
The biggest difference for me is the impact ypou have. In a small company, your own contribution is a much larger part of the total output, and that is very satisfying. Frequently it also means faster turn-around time - what you do gets deployed much quicker.
The three main criteria are "the product is software", "great colleagues" and "challenging problems". Small/large is not on the list, but maybe I should have added "having a high impact".
What makes startups seem great is the survivor bias. The shitty ones with MBA-style management and closed allocation tend to faceplant. The good ones grow and become less good gradually.
Also, many of the big-company perks mentioned in the OP don't exist.
Big companies actually don't provide better benefits than startups. Banks, for just one example, have pretty shitty health insurance due to misguided shareholder activism and cost-cutting. Also, it takes forever to move up in large companies. The upshot of that, though, is that you'll never have a 25-year-old manager-favorite ladyboy hipster douche barking orders at you (which I have seen demolish a startup or two).
Finally, large companies are not great at long-term projects. Those tend to be cut first when there are cuts, and in most companies, continuous cutting is now in favor over press-making layoffs. The best people in large companies (excluding companies with a real research presence, and those aren't paying salaries that would impress anyone on HN) want to work on immediate P&L stuff, not long-term efforts that lack job security and short-term promotability.
There is exactly one reason to work for big companies, and it can be substantial: lateral mobility. Your compensation won't go up fast, but if you can move to more interesting work under a manager the ability to protect, it can be a pretty damn good deal, because with a good manager it doesn't matter that you're in a mediocre company. You'll get to learn a lot (even if you won't have a major impact) and your work will be interesting enough (much more interesting than what most of these startups do) to provide jumping off points into credible side projects and, possibly, startups. It can be a great way to get a 5-year stint (there are plenty of HR Boomer-o-saurs who are still stuck up about "job hoppers") and a lot of time to learn.
The problem is that most companies make it a lot harder to move internally than they advertise. They have ridiculous "headcount" issues and it's almost impossible to move in most firms without a top-20% performance record... but impossible to get a top-20% review unless your manager sees you as having staying power. So you have to play dishonest political games, in most companies, to get the one big-company benefit (lateral mobility) that actually matters.
In fact, most companies are so fucked up on the matter of internal mobility that the only genuine time at which transfer's possible is shortly after a promotion, but managers rarely promote people who seem to have any interest in mobility.
>In fact, most companies are so fucked up on the matter of internal mobility that the only genuine time at which transfer's possible is shortly after a promotion, but managers rarely promote people who seem to have any interest in mobility.
This was the driving reason I left my prior employer. I had no internal mobility without some sort of advocate, despite the large number of open reqs. At the end I got hit by the political double whammy of not having any support for a lateral transfer from my manager[1] and being on the 800lb gorilla project that was trying to draw people in from elsewhere at the time I was trying to leave. The company got away with shit like this, though, because most people thought that was just the way it was at large companies, and small companies were too risky and flaky.
[1] I even got labelled "disloyal" in the heat of the moment for expressing the desire once.
Here's probably more than you care to read on this topic. I just finished it this morning: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/gervais-macle...
The short version, as pertains to what you experience, is that companies have (since Enron made it fashionable) included performance reviews in the transfer packet as a way of enabling managerial extortion (for the sake of project expediency, although it's unclear that it achieves that) and passive firing, reducing lawsuit risk. The passive-firing infrastructure is supposed to be there to make low-performers look objectively unwanted (lawsuit issues) but the headcount limitations and transfer blocks actually end up getting used against high-perfomers that their managers want to keep captive. Google (which has Enron-style performance reviews) has a well-documented problem with this.
Even in companies with "open allocation" you are not given completely free choice where to work, because you first need to gain credibility. It's faster to achieve level of credibility, required full freedom on what to work inn smaller company with open allocation than in big corporation, even ones, which are pretending to have open allocation.
It depends. Small companies can go to shit quickly. I've seen it happen at under 10 people.
Even in companies with "open allocation" you are not given completely free choice where to work, because you first need to gain credibility. It's faster to achieve level of credibility, required full freedom on what to work inn smaller company with open allocation than in big corporation, even ones, which are pretending to have open allocation.
That goes against open allocation, because the whole idea is that you have the right to work for the company directly without needing a "credible" person to sanction it. Open allocation probably requires that projects have some degree of sanction, but that should be based on project merits as much as possible. And if people aren't free to move form one sanctioned project to another, then it's not open allocation.
This doesn't mean what you think it means. Or at least I hope it doesn't.
"Golden child" doesn't have enough bite and Ancient Greek references get old.
I've seen this type of sentiment before - it's quite common for people who don't go through school.
University level education (quality ones) give the student exactly the same feeling that the author is describing as enjoying. The only difference is that the pace of learning and achievement is far higher then it is in the real world in which you are subject to daily demands for return on investment and stability.
I've been through both University level education and real world work - I'd take University any day of the week. University provides an environment in which experimentation and play is encouraged - I have yet to find a work environment that does the same, even among small start-ups.
Engineering programs are a great example - most provide opportunities for students to join projects outside of the core curriculum to build something cool (sun powered cars, robot competitions, etc). Even the Arts programs offer opportunities to do exciting things (and especially fine arts).
My comment was to dispute the notion that school isn't an environment where someone can push the boundaries - on the contrary, it's the very place that boundaries SHOULD be pushed (both personal and other).
As someone with a masters degree in CS I can counter-assure that University is faaaaar more open to experimentation and delving into new things than a company.
Seriously there's so much variation in how they go about things that it makes no sense to say big is bad and small is better. It all depends on the individual case. I've seen a lot of dysfunctional companies of all sizes.
In my experience this just simply isn't true. Both large and small companies can put up reasons why you can't innovate or experiment.
For small companies there is always a deadline or budget that gets in the way.
The size of a company has no real bearing on what they allow their employees to do.
The only difference I've seen is with well run and poorly run companies.
In my experience these are evenly distributed between big and small companies.
Or put another way, your manager will determine 90% of your happiness at your job.
PS. I am not saying that all private companies are awesome. Some are exceptionally bad e.g. Lucas Arts used to be pretty horrible. I am not saying that all public companies are horrible either - Apple seems to be all right.
