Comment by wrigby
6 years ago
There's a LOT of survivorship bias in this article. I personally worked in small companies (30 - 200 employees total) and startups (4 employees, including myself) before ending up at a big tech company, and I would have preferred to do this journey in the opposite direction - that is, work a few years at a BigCorp, and then work for a startup.
Getting to see what works and what doesn't work in the context of a bigcorp is really valuable, and I think this post discounts that. A lot of technical mistakes I've made could have been remedied by simply seeing industry best practices, and there was no way I would have learned these things in school.
Completely agree.
I worked for Microsoft this year. Had an amazing experience, learned a ton, built a great network, had benefits and was well compensated. I did this all while taking almost 0 risk. The idea that working for a tech giant is "maintaining the status quo," but working for a startup is "making something new," is perhaps not accurate.
Working at a startup can be great. Working at a tech giant can be great. Just don't make your decision based on one guy who turned down a personal offer from Peter Thiel (and was later employee #10).
Working for a consulting firm with a lot of startup clients can also be a great experience if you plan to go that way yourself down the road, at least in what YC would call "hard tech."
You get to see the inner workings of a bunch of startups in your field, and you get to see which ones work out and which ones don't. Of course, the pay isn't great, but you do get to work on a lot of cool stuff in a "startup-ish" environment.
When you work for a giant corporation of any sort, you are inherently breaking capitalism as it is.
There's no foreseeable way around this , it's irresponsible, and all the suffering you're seeing it the world is the cost of many many millions of people giving themselves a pass on this.
I strongly urge you to recognize that any of the life benefits you get from working at one of these places are reaped from the lives of others. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQEO2P9j_vU)
Please don't take HN on generic ideological tangents. They're repetitive, tedious, and off topic here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As opposed to working for a small money losing company backed by VCs who hoped to be bought out by big tech companies....
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I don't disagree with you in theory, but when an article is suggesting that you should instead make $200M in equity by working for a venture capitalist - and not just any venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, the man who is sad about women's suffrage because it means unchecked libertarianism is less likely to be chosen by free elections - for spy firm Palantir?
Go work for a big tech company, it's far more ethical if you think capitalism is bad.
Also keep in mind that there simply isn't $200M to go around for every software engineer, let alone every human. These concentrated payoffs only come at the expense of others. It's not universal advice and it can't be.
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So all the suffering in the world is the fault of giant corporations? How giant do they have to be to go from being the building blocks of capitalism to breaking it?
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I just cringed at the thought of some BigCo software company project management tracking obsessive approach being pigeonholed onto a startup. Or the various other ‘processes’ that built up continually over the years at BigCo to minimize any sort of risk at the expense of speed and flexibility.
The bigger benefit is working with really smart people. I think you’re over valuing the utility of a lot of the stuff that goes on at bigger firms, mostly out of necessity but also many times due to managers trying to justify their own existence in the company so they create ‘processes’. But also just merely the scale of the operation where highly automated fancy systems would be a complete waste of time for a startup with a small team and a short run way.
GP comment never said "processes," so I'm not sure why you're focusing on that. They said "best practices", which is totally different.
Sorry I just think I wanted to go on a rant at all the big software co "project managers" that got hired into startups I worked at and ruined everything.
That wasn't a proper response to OP's comment.
Yeah, I could have been more clear - the BigCo I'm at is still pretty light on process, and teams are free to use whatever project management approach they want. As seattle_spring conjectured, I was thinking more about technical best practices. I've learned many patterns from the software I work with now, and I've been able to grow from working with really smart engineers that have enough experience to be pragmatic without compromising on quality.
An (admittedly controversial) example is repos-per-service vs a monorepo: now that I've worked at a bigco with a monorepo, I would have used a monorepo at my previous company.
Personally having also worked at monorepoCo, I would only recommend it to another company with a good enough system to support it. I’ve heard of places trying to implement it with git sub folders and hellacious branching, to great lack of success