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I have worked at many companies ranging in size from small two person startups to massive megacorps (Hewlett Packard, Salesforce). One big difference I saw was
by eldenbishop 8y ago
I have worked at many companies ranging in size from small two person startups to massive megacorps (Hewlett Packard, Salesforce). One big difference I saw was that, in a small company, everyone succeeds or fails together. Everyone wins or everyone loses. This creates focus on shipping good product, not getting promoted over other people or competing for a bonus pool for the top 10% of the team. Larger companies have numerous structures and methodologies that decouple this and create many paths to "winning" that have nothing to do with shipping anything of value. You can completely fail to do anything and still get promoted. There is tremendous internal competition and politics, fighting over budgets, hiring, resources and power plays of all sorts. I personally got huge bonuses for literally doing nothing as managers and teams optimized around the internal political structure rather than any kind of product strategy.
- panic 8y agoI think this is really the heart of it -- if you're working on a product together, all you have to worry about is whether your work is improving the product. You can get other people to help you as long as it also helps the product. It's a lot easier to be productive when you don't have to worry about whether team X will be on board or whether executive Y will like what you're doing.