But what about all the stupid stuff you have to deal with when you work for the man? That stuff just isn’t that important. If I forget to log my task estimation

But what about all the stupid stuff you have to deal with when you work for the man? That stuff just isn’t that important. If I forget to log my task estimation hours my manager might send me an email. People actually work for companies where they "log [...] task estimation hours"? I'm afraid of what throwing up in my mouth on a regular basis will do to my throat. I'll pass. Here's why your job in a TPS labyrinth isn't stable: your boss might only be sending you the email because his boss made a point of it. It might be a one-off that he thinks about once and never again. Or he might actually care. You just don't know. He might fire you when you stop doing that shit (either because you forget, or get sick of it). He might consider you not to have done any work unless you log it in the system, and you might be too busy actually doing work to log that shit. Or, you might get along great with him and be just fine. If you have decent social skills, you can get a 90% guess at which way things are going to go, but that's far from certainty, and the boss who won't throw you under the bus for his own benefit is very rare. Big companies are only a better option than any other job (in terms of job security) if they subvert manager-as-SPOF and that's really hard to do. What seems to work (perversely) is bureaucracy and obfuscation: if you make it very, very hard for a manager to bad-mouth reports to the managers they want to transfer under (in large part, this requires transfer talks occurring without the original manager's knowledge) you can actually create a culture in which managers don't hold all the cards. Big-company vs. startup is a hard question. There are really great parts of big companies, and there are shitty startups. There are even startups that have those kinds of inane processes. The whole gamut exists. But I would rather be eating clay than work at a company where people are micromanaged down to "task estimation hours".