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I worked for Microsoft about 10 years back. Unfun workplace. I thought it would be so fun to work there. I fought and got through three interviews. The team see

I worked for Microsoft about 10 years back. Unfun workplace. I thought it would be so fun to work there. I fought and got through three interviews. The team seemed cool initially. By week three I knew I had made a mistake. These people seemed so stodgy, so incapable of having a bit of fun. So utterly by the book. They almost seemed unable to deviate from the script. There was a sense of fear in the air that took a month or two to sense. I swore then I'd never work for another massive IT company and left after 6 months. I now focus on non-profits and I couldn't be happier. I get to work on cool projects that I often come up with. If I think I can build or code something better than what we have, I'm given the green light to do a working prototype. What more could I ask for? Sure, the pay is lower. But I work 8 hours and go home. There are no laborious crunch days trying to get something out the door. No meticulous, nasty meetings where everyone is playing one-upmanship, or buzzword bingo with gems like "synergistic" or using stupid phrases like "we tuned x and boom goes the dynamite", no talk of cross-functional team spearheading, no sharing an office with people who won't stop farting despite the nasty looks and obvious can of Glade. Give me a task, a deadline, a budget, and get out of the way. I have rarely asked for a software license. I can do most things with FOSS/Linux. I may ask for a Raspberry Pi to prototype something or a slice of a VM for Ubuntu Server. These things cost almost nothing. I truly enjoy getting things done with minimal resources. It's fun working within contraints like RAM, hardware specs. I could see how embedded work would be fun in this regard.

d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
With everything in life--it depends on the team you work with. I work for a Fortune 50 company and in my first role the team was a lot of fun. We had Slack and the memes were borderline for a work environment but it was a high trust team. I switched to a new department and I feel like I work for the federal government. It's like there's a fear around expressing any emotion. There are pros and cons to each situation. I used to work for a startup and that culture was a lot of fun at first but the "blow investor money on catered lunches every day but you can't hire more engineers" mentality seemed very childish to me. I learned that I like the middle ground.

d0gsg0w00f 5y ago

With everything in life--it depends on the team you work with. I work for a Fortune 50 company and in my first role the team was a lot of fun. We had Slack and the memes were borderline for a work environment but it was a high trust team. I switched to a new department and I feel like I work for the federal government. It's like there's a fear around expressing any emotion. There are pros and cons to each situation. I used to work for a startup and that culture was a lot of fun at first but the "blow investor money on catered lunches every day but you can't hire more engineers" mentality seemed very childish to me. I learned that I like the middle ground.