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Are big companies usually that bad to work for?

2 points by therealworld ↗ HN
Sorry if this comes across as a vague question. I'm currently a freshman in college and disliking the experience. I don't feel like I'm getting much out of classes, and it seems to be a lot of memorization or inefficient work that doesn't go anywhere.

After lurking on forums and reading articles, I've started to get the feeling that big companies are similar, or maybe worse. I'm having trouble getting excited about stuff like working on Microsoft's new version of Excel.

It's this general feeling of doom that I've started to have. I don't know if you can generalize experiences at big companies, but do they typically contain the drudgery, repetition, and corporate feel that I'm experiencing in college?

What are the alternatives? Working for a small company?

6 comments

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bartonfink
It depends on the company and what you want. I've worked for big companies that were tolerable and small companies that were abysmal (the one that comes to mind was run by a guy with money who wanted to play software-tycoon and did it badly enough he lost his entire engineering staff in the space of one month).

Since you're a freshman, take some internships and see what floats your boat.

therealworld
Thanks for the response. It's interesting that you use the word tolerable. Did you enjoy working at the big companies at all?
bartonfink
Sure. I enjoyed the people I worked with at the big companies quite a bit. In fact, almost as a rule I've enjoyed my coworkers more at big companies than at small ones. People were generally more laid back and pleasant to work around, and while I found the number of "lifers" a little unsettling, it was more of a temporal mismatch than a cultural one (I was the youngest in my department by at least 10 years and had no inclination to settle down where the job was). Now, I'm at a small-ish company and I've got far more responsibility than I did at either of the big companies, but that's mostly because there are fewer people around to handle the work that needs to be done. I'm the de-facto DBA for the product I work on largely because I understand databases better than anyone on the team. That has turned into me needing to learn Hadoop "yesterday" because the need is there and the one Hadoop guy we had just quit. At a big company this doesn't happen because big companies are, well, big. That's comforting because there's almost always someone who can give you a hand. It's also somewhat limiting because there's almost always someone more specialized in an area you want to branch out into, and they'll get assignments because working in that area is their job. If you want to wear a lot of hats, big companies aren't the best place - but if you want to have folks around who can help you out, small companies aren't going to be able to offer that kind of hand-holding. That said, if I could go to a big company and get similar respect and responsibility to what I currently enjoy, I absolutely would.

As an example of a big company role that would be fascinating - I've got a friend who's a VP of Consumer Analytics at one of the major banks in the US. His job is literally to comb through data and make recommendations regarding bank policy based upon that data. For an example of his work, the last time I spoke with him, he was working on figuring out the optimal amount of cash to keep in each ATM across the country. He gets considerable latitude to do things however he wants - all that matters is the results. For instance, he tends to write a lot of R code himself, but his assignments do not include the phrase "Implement this system using R" or anything near it. He gets to decide what works and he is only responsible for the output and not his modus operandi.

bdunbar
1. Stick with college, get the degree. It proves to employers you can stick with something, which is valuable and will get you places.

2. I've worked for the big companies, small ones, medium.

3. There is no 'usual' about any of them. They all sucked in various ways. And they were all excellent, in their own ways.

4. A lot depends on your chain of command and your peers.

5. It's not all MS and Excel. It Gets Better.

6. There is no 6.

benburleson
Many freshman level courses aren't very interesting. You're learning to lay the groundwork so you can efficiently do more interesting work later. The most important thing I took away from my engineering degree wasn't any specific knowledge, it was the problem solving method, break problems down, etc.

I only have experience at two employers, but I say Yes, the big company was a pretty poor work experience. There were definitely people above me trying to make it better, but they were struggling against the slow-moving bureaucracy of government contracts. It's easy at a big company to get pigeon-holed because there are so many employees. If you start to stand out in one area everyone will come to you for answers in that area. At the smaller employer, I've had the opportunity to try on different hats and only pigeon-hole myself as much as I want to. It's more exciting and I've learned more that I ever would have at the big company.

adamwshepard
Agreeing with others - there is no black-and-white when it comes to companies. There are pockets of exciting and innovative teams in even the biggest, slowest-moving companies, and there are small companies that will suck the life out of you.

Take Washington Post, for instance. Big, lumbering, dead-trees news org, right? Check out WaPo Labs sometime - they play around with projects that you might not expect from BigCo. I worked in a division of a big online company for a time, and we had a great culture as a division, and also within the smaller team I was on, a real drive to move the needle in new ways for the business. I've also worked in a 4-person company that couldn't get itself organized enough to get meaningful work done. Long story short, culture of the team and company are probably going to be more important than size at the end of the day. Oh, and industry will probably make a difference as well. If you can't get excited about MS Excel, don't work for the MS Office team - maybe try the XBox team, or a different field entirely.

Re: college, bdunbar makes a good point - there's a ton of hype around skipping it or dropping out and jumping straight into starting your own company, but personally I'm still on the fence about that. If you can stick it out to upperclass years in school, you'll have a lot more latitude to take courses you want, which will by definition make school more interesting for you. Call me biased, but I think having a degree on my resume has served me better than not having one would have.