Joking aside, I was intrigued by the list of good things at the end of the post. Some I could understand, but some seemed to fall into that strange category of things that people say are good but really seem only to lead to more of the things they say are bad. In this list we have:
> There are actual opportunities for career development.
Does "career development" just mean "more money"? If so, why not just say "there are opportunities to make more money"? If not, what is "career development" that is not just becoming more deeply buried in an organization with the various dysfunctions described in the rest of the post?
> It's satisfying to write software used by millions of people.
Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?
> Does "career development" just mean "more money"? If so, why not just say "there are opportunities to make more money"? If not, what is "career development" that is not just becoming more deeply buried in an organization with the various dysfunctions described in the rest of the post?
In life, everyone that thinks a lot is eventually confronted with the reality that we're all just minor players within much bigger systems. When you follow this thread, pretty deep questions start to fall out like "how can I be just in an unjust society?". Or "what's the best way that I, as an individual, can have a positive impact on my community?". Or "Is there any point in trying to change systems given my small role within them?".
To these types of questions there's various different responses and consequences. Some people dive in feet first and engage heavily with the mechanisms they have to enact change (such as local politics, grass roots political movements, activism etc). Some people, overwhelmed by the weight of the system, disengage entirely.
Now to answer your question, I believe in the work that we're doing (or else I probably wouldn't have joined). Career development at the company isn't just more money (though that's obviously a component), it's being given more responsibilities alongside the capacity to enact more and more change.
Faced with a dysfunctional organisation that you're a part of, what do you do? The options as I see it are roughly:
- Change companies, and acknowledge that the dysfunction is insurmountable.
- Do your job and stay at the position you're in.
- Embed deeper into the dysfunctional organisation, with the view that you can be an agent for positive change.
>Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?
To some people, yes. There are people out there that take satisfaction in doing harm. Not me, nor do I believe the work I do is harmful. I didn't think I had to be so granular as to say "It's satisfying to write software I believe is a net positive to society used by millions".
> Does "career development" just mean "more money"?
Big companies means more opportunities to lead bugger project. At a big company, it’s not uncommon to in-house what would’ve been an entire startup’s product. And depending on the environment, you may work on several of those project over the course of a few years. Or if you want to try your hand at leading bigger teams, that’s usually easier to find in a big company.
> Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?
There’s nothing inherently good about startups and small companies. The good or bad is case-by-case.
> Does "career development" just mean "more money"?
No. Career development includes paid training sessions, title promotions (junior -> senior, etc.) opportunities to work on larger projects in more significant roles (resume building), and opportunities to transfer into management, as well as (in some cases) opportunities to publish conference papers and the like. As you get older, this kind of career development becomes more important because it is recognized by people who will hire you.
I don’t think enterprise software is by definition bad. You can absolutely make good enterprise software, but doing that while adhering to the morass of requirements is a skill unto itself.
And something that most people in an enterprise are just not all that interested in, since they’re never judged on how pleasant the software they deliver is to use.
Hell, they not ever see any of the users interacting with the software. I’ve been at $ENTERPRISE for 7 years, and I’ve visited our users exactly once.
> ... Remy's Law of Enterprise Software ... the list of good things at the end of the post.
Like the poster of the blog article, I too have worked in very large enterprise. Think 200K staff, 10K distinct servers, etc...
I had the lucky opportunity to assist the CTO in hundred-million-dollar enterprise software purchasing decisions. I got to interview vendor after vendor, grilling them to see if they're compatible with "large enterprise".
Most weren't.
This wasn't about some Kafkaesque hoops they had jump through while blindfolded and on fire, although I'm sure that's the impression most of them got.
The requirements were simple and perfectly sound architecture principles that they either met or did not meet. If they didn't meet them, then maybe their software was "good enough" for tiny clients, but would never work at scale.
I even made a list, which from memory was something like:
1. Support single-sign-on from external sources such as LDAP, OAuth, whatever. (We're not going to sync our directory and every user password to your insecure garbage software.)
2. Have some sort of audit log. Administrative or configuration changes especially. (Some places have hundreds of admins, not all of whom are fully trusted.)
3. Have an unattended installation process, even if it's just VM cloning or whatever. (I'm not clicking through your GUI wizard 500 times at 3am on Sunday morning.)
4. Allow incremental migrations/upgrades. I.e.: The "easy" process of stop-the-world; one-way-big-bang; start-the-world process is not viable in an enterprise with 10K tenants where the upgrade may or may not work for all of them on the first try.
5. Scale. This can be as simple as having indexes on "user" and "tenant" tables, which is easily overlooked when the typical dev works with a scale of 1 user and 1 tenant. Similarly, using combo boxes / drop downs is a no-go for most fields such as security groups. (We have 700K security groups. No, we can't delete 699.9K as a workaround to make your GUI not crash from an OOM error.)
6. Accessibility is mandatory. With up to 200K permanent and 1 million occasional users, every disability will be represented. Not just vision or hearing problems, but motor-neuron issues, amputees, etc... (You name it, we have someone on staff with it.)
Etc...
Seen in that light, Enterprise software starts to make sense. It's not baroque or malicious, it's just taken on a certain form to suit a purpose.
For example, I didn't understand why Active Directory uses search dialog boxes for every "picker" GUI control instead of a simpler drop-down or something similar... until I worked in an environment with 2 million objects in the directory.
> > It's satisfying to write software used by millions of people.
>
> Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?
I work for a bank, so the software/service my colleagues and I deliver is probably at best "bottom of mind" for most people and at worst actively despised by many (maybe not even our specific implementation of it, but the idea in general that you depend on some behemoth to receive and send money).
Still it's very satisfying to deliver it, because if I mess up it's my mom that will no longer be able to pay for her online purchase or that large energy company everyone knows that can not pay out their salaries. What I do directly impacts people's lives in very practical and real ways. I would really miss that if I worked on some niche SaaS product with a few customers only.
>> There are actual opportunities for career development.
> Does "career development" just mean "more money"?
To me it seems it’s related to the specialist-generalist point that it’s easier to focus on one thing rather than to do all the chores you face in SME environments.
> Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?
sadly many engineers might detach or feel powerless or simply not their part of the job, and only be attracted to the huge scale. sadly you can only ever work at that scale if you work for a few of the giants, of which mostly all do the same algorithmic dark patterns extraction methods shareholder benefit maximalism capitalism pushes them into
> At this point I hadn't realised that finding who is responsible for something in a large organisation is very much not straightforward.
This resonated strongly with me. Last time I worked in an Enterprise shop, I happened to inherit the approval system - every app in the entire org, whether an internal app or from a vendor, got configured into this home-grown monstrosity of an access approval system. It actually worked well despite being made of spaghetti, but one side effect of being the tech owner was that I knew exactly who was in charge of every system in the organization. At some point I realized that my success there was at least partially due to being the human who knew how to connect all the dots, because when someone needed such info, the answer for the entire org was, "Ask Dave."
I did a contract at an airline.
I was tasked with figuring out why the barcodes a new system was generating weren't scanning.
I never did find a person still working there who knew what was wrong,
but by sheer persistence I finally found an old email someone had saved a copy o to their space on the company SharePoint.
The problem turned out to be the wrong kind of cryptographic signature on content.
- new leadership will push out the old guard and replace them with friends
- groups get renamed for the Nth time in N years. People continue to do the same job, but now the department has an additional "Innovation", "Discovery", or "Leadership" inserted into the title
> - groups get renamed for the Nth time in N years. People continue to do the same job, but now the department has an additional "Innovation", "Discovery", or "Leadership" inserted into the title
Sometimes, I wish we name the team ‘Pikachu’ and continue on working. This way, others would know the name does not really matter, so they would stop changing the name. The amount of work to change the documentation and lets others know our team changed name has caused a lot of unnecessary work.
>- new leadership will push out the old guard and replace them with friends
My mortal nemesis brings his whole helpdesk and development team across slowly whenever he starts at a new business. Which is crazy, because as far as I can see the benefit to him is simply loyalty. They dont complain or go over his head when he fails to deliver. I have receipts from staff who worked with him at other businesses where he just follows the same pattern.
1. Identify problems (The problem is the lack of a new CRM from a big microsoft partner.)
2. Spend lots of money to fix the problem (Free trips to vegas 3 times per year thanks to the CRM partner and microsoft)
3. Fail to deliver the CRM (The problem was not a big enough scope)
4. Rescope the project. (more bennies)
5. Would have failed to deliver it again however I just got a new job transforming another business enjoy your crapheap.
We have an internal infrastructure-as-code library built on Terraform CDK that automatically provisions monitoring resources in Datadog and Pagerduty. One day, I simply removed a required argument named 'team', realizing that it has a half life of 7 months.
About urgency, there is a simple way to tell what is really urgent and what is "urgent".
If your boss tells you it is urgent, it is probably not.
If people working in the field call you directly, now you have a real emergency.
The reason is simple. If it comes from your boss, it probably went up the ladder, showed up in red in some report made to the top management who then got all worked up, started shouting orders that got down the corporate ladder until it hit you. In reality, it may have taken weeks between the time the problem happened and the time it came back to you. It can wait until you finish your current task.
People stuck on the field are not going to wait that long, they want a solution now and if they can't do it by themselves, they will focus all of their energy into finding people who can and contact them directly, instead of just writing a memo to whoever wants to read it.
Very fun and interesting article. I'm currently working in enterprise for around 3 years. I sure am growing technically, but I feel like I learn more about people, communications and bureaucracy here. That comment about budget and mouse is also on track, but with financial stability that working in $ENTERPRISE brings, I can just buy the mouse myself. Maybe some empire will question me regarding the unauthorized mouse, but I can just... ignore... um, talk myself out of the fake urgencies of mouse authorization.
> If the selection function for senior leadership is tuned to a certain personality type, you're doomed to repeat your mistakes.
Amen, Amen... Preach brother!
All this rings true, from the complete org dysfunction, to the security theatre, all of it paints the hellscape of large enterprises in great detail.
My own personal struggles in this corner world resonate strongly here. I worked in a large energy company, with layers upon layers of incompetence and waste.
Including paying a consulting company a small fortune to build a data warehouse that was so locked down that they had to pay them more and regularly, to access the data it contained.
Security theatre where bozos would open your desk drawer if it was unlocked and confiscate your paper notes and books unless you crawled back to the apologizing.
Sometimes I consider optimizing for money, and getting a much higher paying job at $ENTERPRISE, then peacing out once I have enough saved for an extended sabbatical. But just the thought of going through the interviewing hazing ritual takes the wind out of my sails immediately.
I'm currently at $MIDSIZENOLONGERSTARTUP, which incidentally has its own slew of insane and draining things that are breaking me in its own way.
This article is highly relatable. IMO, everything is done better in startup land except one single thing; enterprise people are willing to concede that everything is complex. This is the one piece of wisdom that enterprise people understand (and often abuse to maximize their billable hours).
Startup people tend to neglect complexity and repeatedly underestimate the harm which comes as a result of 'cutting corners'. The hilarious thing is that once in a millennia, a hot startup like Facebook comes along and grows at such an incredible rate, that they can basically get away with cutting all corners... Proving the exception, not the rule; most startups who try this same approach invariably go out of business because it turns out that technical debt is actually very expensive; not every company can afford throwing hundreds of highly paid engineers at the problem of refactoring a code base over and over... Not every startup can afford to rewrite an entire PHP engine from scratch to achieve a modest speedup.
But the thing which is funny about this is that a startup like Facebook/Meta attracts so much attention that everyone is clamoring for their advice... Literally, everyone wants to take advice about reality from a company whose experience of reality is unlike that of any other company which has ever existed or will ever exist in the foreseeable future... I do believe that the average entrepreneur has more to learn about startups and software development from a bum on the streets of San Francisco than from a tech exec.
I think it's relative, really. The redundancy waves have a rhythm to them, and if you avoid one you're safe until the next. Contrast this to one of my previous experiences at a startup where I came in on Monday to discover there was no money, the CEO had been funnelling company funds to his boyfriend and once discovered the small office had turned to Lord of the Flies.
I wouldn't say I have the perfect job security, but I'm reasonably assured I'll get paid this month and I try not to worry about situations that haven't happened yet. I think if I had a family that depended entirely on me I'd be much more concerned.
I'm not sure I'd call it stockholm syndrome directly, but I'd agree it's definitely some form of conditioning.
I've only really worked for $ENTERPRISE and for just a single reference point the last two places I worked spent >$10M/month on their AWS bills. Most of the points in the article ring true to my experience. I will say that reading comments on HN/X/Reddit/etc it sometimes feels a bit lonely in that even though I know I work with tens of thousands of technologists, I rarely see the unique challenges in getting things done represented in even the slightest way.
> Then I heard word there are other empires. Some were run by tyrannical rulers with strange idiosyncrasies. I began to hear strange whispers, like the next empire over doesn't write any tests, and their only quality assurance process was an entire off-shore team manually clicking through the application. Or that an empire in a distant land has pyramids of software that touch the sky, crafted by thousands of people over decades.
Other empires besides the British (with plantations of manual QA) and the Egyptians (pyramids): the Mongols (ride in out of nowhere to bombard you with requirements and have ridden away before you figured out whether you actually need to deal with them or not), the Spanish (who insist that El Dorado isn't a fictious utopia of a project with full test coverage, full CI/CD, perfect monitoring, but will add every linter and bit of friction they can find to try to get there), the Japanese (who go to floors and campuses across the oceans to commit career suicide by yelling at random stakeholders that they have displeased The Emperor), the Chinese (their floors are always quiet, good luck finding your way through the Forbidden City of Zoom meetings without a map)...
I'm in a similar environment and found this article painfully accurate. I keep thinking my job is to solve problems and ship software...but those are clearly not the revealed preferences* of my org.
The author went from small companies to a big one. Has anyone gone the other way? I'm looking to make that shift and I'm curious how others framed their Enterprise™ experience in a way that resonates with smaller teams.
It's a tale of two cities, in my experience. Much like you, I'm sick of wasting away the best years of my life doing nothing of consequence at $ENTERPRISE and I'm willing to take a 20% pay cut at this point for a chance to actually ship things at a small company.
Unfortunately, I've found that describing what I've learned over the past three years (without any negativity) gives founders the ick. The survival skills you need in the jungle are very different from the ones you need in a zoo, and they feel I've spent too much time in a zoo.
Similarly, large companies want to hire people who understand the value of processes and hierarchies, and interviewing at these places is a challenge for those who have spent most of their career in startups.
> The author went from small companies to a big one. Has anyone gone the other way?
I have and the biggest difference is that the larger the company, the more the problem to solve is interpersonal and/or group politics and not technical issues.
Large companies typically take a Golden Handcuffs[0] approach to retain valuable employees. Usually, this makes people who have options to leave accept more organizational bovine excrement than if the financial carrot stick did not exist.
As to how to frame the "left mega-corp to effect change" argument needs to be framed... Well, that's about it. Every smaller team I have had the privilege to work with has understood why I did.
Pretty accurate having worked for startups and $ENTERPRISE alike.
I recently switched from startup to $ENTERPRISE and the thing I’m struggling with the most is time zones. My manager is 11 hours ahead and infrastructure/security change approvers are 6 hours behind.
Now add the big shift back to on-premises infrastructure and it’ll be impossible to get anything done.
Bigger enterprises only care about consistency in delivering what they want to deliver. The actual goals may be set by chasing a number, regulatory process, executive fiat or a million other things.
I'm in a similar situation, having left a startup a year ago to work at $BIGCORP, naively thinking it would benefit my résumé. This is all painfully accurate.
The other thing about working for $BIGCORP is that it molds your skills to be hyper-specific to this company. It's less about learning to use cool technology stacks, than it is about learning the internal tools, procedures, and unspoken etiquette of the company. Skills that are vital to navigate the everyday complexity of $BIGCORP, but that you can't really export to any other job.
On the other hand, working at $BIGCORP will probably give you very good domain knowledge (as $BIGCORP's software is likely complex and actively used by many many people who signed very expensive contracts, and besides that also the knowledge on how to navigate the internal complexities of a $BIGCORP) that will be useful for work in other companies?
Also missing:
- vendor review takes 18 months
- adding a new product with an existing vendor triggers a totally new vendor review for unknown reasons
- you get promoted by building complexity that should never need to exist
Fun read, from a Swedish background "Uncertainty is weakness" seems so very American though and the opposite of both how we operate and what TheRightWay (tm) should be. As a senior dev working as a consultant for the past 8 years coming in and questioning how things work and recognizing what's unknown or doesn't make sense on a daily/weekly basis sometimes feels like my biggest contribution to the team and usually starts many interesting and productive sessions.
It hurt to read this. I have seen all of this and more.
- Teams that produce negative output for years with no consequence
- Six figure monthly AWS bills on unused resources
- Technical people who can't use a computer
- Constant re-orgs and turn over
Wait until this guy experiences the wrath of big consultants...
It is hell, but it pays. I get my fulfillment building my own things outside of work and dream of the day I can escape.
I don’t have the energy to build anything outside of work. I spend all of my free time trying to mentally recover. I’m left drained after work. If I’m going to do extra “work”, I always think I should do more work stuff, to attempt to get ahead on some project and reduce the stress of things than have been hanging over my head.
The only time this shifts is when I have a couple weeks off. During that period I will inevitably start some kind of project, but I have to keep it small, because I know it will die as soon as I start back to work again.
[+] [-] BrenBarn|7 months ago|reply
Joking aside, I was intrigued by the list of good things at the end of the post. Some I could understand, but some seemed to fall into that strange category of things that people say are good but really seem only to lead to more of the things they say are bad. In this list we have:
> There are actual opportunities for career development.
Does "career development" just mean "more money"? If so, why not just say "there are opportunities to make more money"? If not, what is "career development" that is not just becoming more deeply buried in an organization with the various dysfunctions described in the rest of the post?
> It's satisfying to write software used by millions of people.
Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?
[+] [-] churchofturing|7 months ago|reply
In life, everyone that thinks a lot is eventually confronted with the reality that we're all just minor players within much bigger systems. When you follow this thread, pretty deep questions start to fall out like "how can I be just in an unjust society?". Or "what's the best way that I, as an individual, can have a positive impact on my community?". Or "Is there any point in trying to change systems given my small role within them?".
To these types of questions there's various different responses and consequences. Some people dive in feet first and engage heavily with the mechanisms they have to enact change (such as local politics, grass roots political movements, activism etc). Some people, overwhelmed by the weight of the system, disengage entirely.
Now to answer your question, I believe in the work that we're doing (or else I probably wouldn't have joined). Career development at the company isn't just more money (though that's obviously a component), it's being given more responsibilities alongside the capacity to enact more and more change.
Faced with a dysfunctional organisation that you're a part of, what do you do? The options as I see it are roughly:
- Change companies, and acknowledge that the dysfunction is insurmountable.
- Do your job and stay at the position you're in.
- Embed deeper into the dysfunctional organisation, with the view that you can be an agent for positive change.
>Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?
To some people, yes. There are people out there that take satisfaction in doing harm. Not me, nor do I believe the work I do is harmful. I didn't think I had to be so granular as to say "It's satisfying to write software I believe is a net positive to society used by millions".
[+] [-] beering|7 months ago|reply
Big companies means more opportunities to lead bugger project. At a big company, it’s not uncommon to in-house what would’ve been an entire startup’s product. And depending on the environment, you may work on several of those project over the course of a few years. Or if you want to try your hand at leading bigger teams, that’s usually easier to find in a big company.
> Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?
There’s nothing inherently good about startups and small companies. The good or bad is case-by-case.
[+] [-] makeitdouble|7 months ago|reply
If you want to become a researcher in data science or developper evangelist for instance, you'll need a org that can sustain your work.
Or if you want to be a micro service architect, you'll be booed in a 3 people shop but heartfully welcomed in 3000 people companies.
Same for engineering manager paths, it only makes sense if you have the headcount.
> software is bad, or harms
What you work on doesn't need to be Enterprise software. Hopefully it isn't.
[+] [-] AdamH12113|7 months ago|reply
No. Career development includes paid training sessions, title promotions (junior -> senior, etc.) opportunities to work on larger projects in more significant roles (resume building), and opportunities to transfer into management, as well as (in some cases) opportunities to publish conference papers and the like. As you get older, this kind of career development becomes more important because it is recognized by people who will hire you.
[+] [-] lelanthran|7 months ago|reply
That was not my takeaway, because earlier he alluded (twice) to the fact that titles are a thing:
1. A senior technical person who can't turn on a computer and an analyst not being able to speak english,
2. `I have met no less than 6 (six) people with the title "head of architecture".`
So I am guessing that is what he means by "career development"; you can acquire impressive titles.
[+] [-] Aeolun|7 months ago|reply
And something that most people in an enterprise are just not all that interested in, since they’re never judged on how pleasant the software they deliver is to use.
Hell, they not ever see any of the users interacting with the software. I’ve been at $ENTERPRISE for 7 years, and I’ve visited our users exactly once.
[+] [-] jiggawatts|7 months ago|reply
Like the poster of the blog article, I too have worked in very large enterprise. Think 200K staff, 10K distinct servers, etc...
I had the lucky opportunity to assist the CTO in hundred-million-dollar enterprise software purchasing decisions. I got to interview vendor after vendor, grilling them to see if they're compatible with "large enterprise".
Most weren't.
This wasn't about some Kafkaesque hoops they had jump through while blindfolded and on fire, although I'm sure that's the impression most of them got.
The requirements were simple and perfectly sound architecture principles that they either met or did not meet. If they didn't meet them, then maybe their software was "good enough" for tiny clients, but would never work at scale.
I even made a list, which from memory was something like:
1. Support single-sign-on from external sources such as LDAP, OAuth, whatever. (We're not going to sync our directory and every user password to your insecure garbage software.)
2. Have some sort of audit log. Administrative or configuration changes especially. (Some places have hundreds of admins, not all of whom are fully trusted.)
3. Have an unattended installation process, even if it's just VM cloning or whatever. (I'm not clicking through your GUI wizard 500 times at 3am on Sunday morning.)
4. Allow incremental migrations/upgrades. I.e.: The "easy" process of stop-the-world; one-way-big-bang; start-the-world process is not viable in an enterprise with 10K tenants where the upgrade may or may not work for all of them on the first try.
5. Scale. This can be as simple as having indexes on "user" and "tenant" tables, which is easily overlooked when the typical dev works with a scale of 1 user and 1 tenant. Similarly, using combo boxes / drop downs is a no-go for most fields such as security groups. (We have 700K security groups. No, we can't delete 699.9K as a workaround to make your GUI not crash from an OOM error.)
6. Accessibility is mandatory. With up to 200K permanent and 1 million occasional users, every disability will be represented. Not just vision or hearing problems, but motor-neuron issues, amputees, etc... (You name it, we have someone on staff with it.)
Etc...
Seen in that light, Enterprise software starts to make sense. It's not baroque or malicious, it's just taken on a certain form to suit a purpose.
For example, I didn't understand why Active Directory uses search dialog boxes for every "picker" GUI control instead of a simpler drop-down or something similar... until I worked in an environment with 2 million objects in the directory.
[+] [-] nikcub|7 months ago|reply
if safety standards are written in blood then enterprise software is written in lawsuits
[+] [-] leokennis|7 months ago|reply
> > It's satisfying to write software used by millions of people. > > Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?
I work for a bank, so the software/service my colleagues and I deliver is probably at best "bottom of mind" for most people and at worst actively despised by many (maybe not even our specific implementation of it, but the idea in general that you depend on some behemoth to receive and send money).
Still it's very satisfying to deliver it, because if I mess up it's my mom that will no longer be able to pay for her online purchase or that large energy company everyone knows that can not pay out their salaries. What I do directly impacts people's lives in very practical and real ways. I would really miss that if I worked on some niche SaaS product with a few customers only.
[+] [-] sbinnee|7 months ago|reply
To me it seems it’s related to the specialist-generalist point that it’s easier to focus on one thing rather than to do all the chores you face in SME environments.
[+] [-] tough|7 months ago|reply
sadly many engineers might detach or feel powerless or simply not their part of the job, and only be attracted to the huge scale. sadly you can only ever work at that scale if you work for a few of the giants, of which mostly all do the same algorithmic dark patterns extraction methods shareholder benefit maximalism capitalism pushes them into
[+] [-] codingdave|7 months ago|reply
This resonated strongly with me. Last time I worked in an Enterprise shop, I happened to inherit the approval system - every app in the entire org, whether an internal app or from a vendor, got configured into this home-grown monstrosity of an access approval system. It actually worked well despite being made of spaghetti, but one side effect of being the tech owner was that I knew exactly who was in charge of every system in the organization. At some point I realized that my success there was at least partially due to being the human who knew how to connect all the dots, because when someone needed such info, the answer for the entire org was, "Ask Dave."
[+] [-] tomaskafka|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cratermoon|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 3eb7988a1663|7 months ago|reply
- new leadership will push out the old guard and replace them with friends
- groups get renamed for the Nth time in N years. People continue to do the same job, but now the department has an additional "Innovation", "Discovery", or "Leadership" inserted into the title
[+] [-] claw-el|7 months ago|reply
Sometimes, I wish we name the team ‘Pikachu’ and continue on working. This way, others would know the name does not really matter, so they would stop changing the name. The amount of work to change the documentation and lets others know our team changed name has caused a lot of unnecessary work.
[+] [-] protocolture|7 months ago|reply
My mortal nemesis brings his whole helpdesk and development team across slowly whenever he starts at a new business. Which is crazy, because as far as I can see the benefit to him is simply loyalty. They dont complain or go over his head when he fails to deliver. I have receipts from staff who worked with him at other businesses where he just follows the same pattern.
1. Identify problems (The problem is the lack of a new CRM from a big microsoft partner.)
2. Spend lots of money to fix the problem (Free trips to vegas 3 times per year thanks to the CRM partner and microsoft)
3. Fail to deliver the CRM (The problem was not a big enough scope)
4. Rescope the project. (more bennies)
5. Would have failed to deliver it again however I just got a new job transforming another business enjoy your crapheap.
[+] [-] linkage|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] vjvjvjvjghv|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|7 months ago|reply
If your boss tells you it is urgent, it is probably not.
If people working in the field call you directly, now you have a real emergency.
The reason is simple. If it comes from your boss, it probably went up the ladder, showed up in red in some report made to the top management who then got all worked up, started shouting orders that got down the corporate ladder until it hit you. In reality, it may have taken weeks between the time the problem happened and the time it came back to you. It can wait until you finish your current task.
People stuck on the field are not going to wait that long, they want a solution now and if they can't do it by themselves, they will focus all of their energy into finding people who can and contact them directly, instead of just writing a memo to whoever wants to read it.
[+] [-] keyshapegeo99|7 months ago|reply
Remove the comment about ever having to work a weekend
Remove the comment about there being opportunities for (technical) career development
Remove the comment about upskilling / training being encouraged
[+] [-] bentinata|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ornornor|7 months ago|reply
If you prefer. Millions wasted on projects going nowhere fast, it no budget for even keeping up with inflation for salaries.
[+] [-] Simon_O_Rourke|7 months ago|reply
Amen, Amen... Preach brother!
All this rings true, from the complete org dysfunction, to the security theatre, all of it paints the hellscape of large enterprises in great detail.
My own personal struggles in this corner world resonate strongly here. I worked in a large energy company, with layers upon layers of incompetence and waste.
Including paying a consulting company a small fortune to build a data warehouse that was so locked down that they had to pay them more and regularly, to access the data it contained.
Security theatre where bozos would open your desk drawer if it was unlocked and confiscate your paper notes and books unless you crawled back to the apologizing.
[+] [-] gherkinnn|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Trasmatta|7 months ago|reply
I'm currently at $MIDSIZENOLONGERSTARTUP, which incidentally has its own slew of insane and draining things that are breaking me in its own way.
[+] [-] Aeolun|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] MarcelOlsz|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jongjong|7 months ago|reply
Startup people tend to neglect complexity and repeatedly underestimate the harm which comes as a result of 'cutting corners'. The hilarious thing is that once in a millennia, a hot startup like Facebook comes along and grows at such an incredible rate, that they can basically get away with cutting all corners... Proving the exception, not the rule; most startups who try this same approach invariably go out of business because it turns out that technical debt is actually very expensive; not every company can afford throwing hundreds of highly paid engineers at the problem of refactoring a code base over and over... Not every startup can afford to rewrite an entire PHP engine from scratch to achieve a modest speedup.
But the thing which is funny about this is that a startup like Facebook/Meta attracts so much attention that everyone is clamoring for their advice... Literally, everyone wants to take advice about reality from a company whose experience of reality is unlike that of any other company which has ever existed or will ever exist in the foreseeable future... I do believe that the average entrepreneur has more to learn about startups and software development from a bum on the streets of San Francisco than from a tech exec.
[+] [-] rf15|7 months ago|reply
As paradoxically as it sounds, aside from the rounds of russian roulette my health feels quite good. ... what?
Should you really just accept that and still claim job security?
Is this what stockholm syndrome feels like?
[+] [-] churchofturing|7 months ago|reply
I wouldn't say I have the perfect job security, but I'm reasonably assured I'll get paid this month and I try not to worry about situations that haven't happened yet. I think if I had a family that depended entirely on me I'd be much more concerned.
I'm not sure I'd call it stockholm syndrome directly, but I'd agree it's definitely some form of conditioning.
[+] [-] jcims|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] solatic|7 months ago|reply
Other empires besides the British (with plantations of manual QA) and the Egyptians (pyramids): the Mongols (ride in out of nowhere to bombard you with requirements and have ridden away before you figured out whether you actually need to deal with them or not), the Spanish (who insist that El Dorado isn't a fictious utopia of a project with full test coverage, full CI/CD, perfect monitoring, but will add every linter and bit of friction they can find to try to get there), the Japanese (who go to floors and campuses across the oceans to commit career suicide by yelling at random stakeholders that they have displeased The Emperor), the Chinese (their floors are always quiet, good luck finding your way through the Forbidden City of Zoom meetings without a map)...
[+] [-] mcdrake|7 months ago|reply
The author went from small companies to a big one. Has anyone gone the other way? I'm looking to make that shift and I'm curious how others framed their Enterprise™ experience in a way that resonates with smaller teams.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference
[+] [-] linkage|7 months ago|reply
Unfortunately, I've found that describing what I've learned over the past three years (without any negativity) gives founders the ick. The survival skills you need in the jungle are very different from the ones you need in a zoo, and they feel I've spent too much time in a zoo.
Similarly, large companies want to hire people who understand the value of processes and hierarchies, and interviewing at these places is a challenge for those who have spent most of their career in startups.
[+] [-] AdieuToLogic|7 months ago|reply
I have and the biggest difference is that the larger the company, the more the problem to solve is interpersonal and/or group politics and not technical issues.
Large companies typically take a Golden Handcuffs[0] approach to retain valuable employees. Usually, this makes people who have options to leave accept more organizational bovine excrement than if the financial carrot stick did not exist.
As to how to frame the "left mega-corp to effect change" argument needs to be framed... Well, that's about it. Every smaller team I have had the privilege to work with has understood why I did.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_handcuffs
[+] [-] stroebs|7 months ago|reply
I recently switched from startup to $ENTERPRISE and the thing I’m struggling with the most is time zones. My manager is 11 hours ahead and infrastructure/security change approvers are 6 hours behind.
Now add the big shift back to on-premises infrastructure and it’ll be impossible to get anything done.
[+] [-] worthless-trash|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|7 months ago|reply
Rationality as we humans see it doesn’t apply.
[+] [-] Gazoche|7 months ago|reply
The other thing about working for $BIGCORP is that it molds your skills to be hyper-specific to this company. It's less about learning to use cool technology stacks, than it is about learning the internal tools, procedures, and unspoken etiquette of the company. Skills that are vital to navigate the everyday complexity of $BIGCORP, but that you can't really export to any other job.
[+] [-] leokennis|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] whobre|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ripped_britches|7 months ago|reply
Great read, would love to hear more from you
[+] [-] johanneskanybal|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] time0ut|7 months ago|reply
It is hell, but it pays. I get my fulfillment building my own things outside of work and dream of the day I can escape.
[+] [-] al_borland|7 months ago|reply
The only time this shifts is when I have a couple weeks off. During that period I will inevitably start some kind of project, but I have to keep it small, because I know it will die as soon as I start back to work again.
[+] [-] worthless-trash|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] johnhamlin|7 months ago|reply
[+] [-] senectus1|7 months ago|reply