I've been in situations like this author describes, and I've been in 60-80 hour/week crunch times that lasted up to a year and a half. I miss the crunch times.

I've been in situations like this author describes, and I've been in 60-80 hour/week crunch times that lasted up to a year and a half. I miss the crunch times. But one constant is that it takes a while to get plugged in at big companies. Rarely are you given a ton of meaningful work right away. The bigger the company, the longer the time. When the giant telecommunications co. (yes that one) bought our company, I was told it takes five years to get plugged in. The architecture group I was on in that company spent most of our time pitching ideas that never saw the light of day. But our biggest internal client, the main company website, was more than happy to tell the top brass they were using our POCs. So the net result was we kept our funding, the boss of the company website looked like he was playing ball but actually got to do whatever he wanted, and we actually produced very little. Basically our boss and the boss of the main website had hacked the system. It took me a year to figure out how it all worked. It was crazy.