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You can have small collaborative teams building cool impactful things inside a big company. It does take a particular set of conditions to pull off, a mix of vi

by boricj 2y ago

You can have small collaborative teams building cool impactful things inside a big company. It does take a particular set of conditions to pull off, a mix of vision and ambition by the engineers as well as agenda and trust by the management I'd say. Niches can have some deeply interesting stuff too that can keep you busy and interested for a long time, but that's more up to personal tastes whether any given niche would be a match for someone or not. I won't go into specifics, but I've seen first-hand the achievements of such a team in a particular niche I happen to find interesting. Unbelievably cool and unique tech just hidden in plain sight and a joy to work with under the hood. On the other hand, it can feel like being on the other side of a treasure hunt, where you secretly hope one day someone outside gets nerd-sniped inside your particular niche, follows the breadcrumbs out in the open and pieces it all together, just to see what madness they could pull off.

AbstractH24 2y ago
Having always shunned big companies, I think this is something I never realized until someone mentioned it last spring. You don’t work for ACME corp, you work for your team there.
- disqard 2y ago
  Having worked at a Big Tech for 5+ years now, I'd disagree. Not only do you work for ACME corp., your team's manager (and their manager, all the way up to the director) need to do what the C-Suite thinks will make Wall St. happy, to raise the stock price. All work planning must justify why this and not something else. You almost certainly cannot pretend that your team is like an independent startup/lab embedded within Acme. If you've always shunned big companies thus far, your intuition has not led you astray. Edit, to add that you do interact with your team, so if that is good, you can be insulated from the rest of Acme in that particular dimension (which is a big component of one's experience of working for any employer).

by boricj 2y ago

AbstractH24 2y ago

Having always shunned big companies, I think this is something I never realized until someone mentioned it last spring. You don’t work for ACME corp, you work for your team there.

disqard 2y ago
Having worked at a Big Tech for 5+ years now, I'd disagree. Not only do you work for ACME corp., your team's manager (and their manager, all the way up to the director) need to do what the C-Suite thinks will make Wall St. happy, to raise the stock price. All work planning must justify why this and not something else. You almost certainly cannot pretend that your team is like an independent startup/lab embedded within Acme. If you've always shunned big companies thus far, your intuition has not led you astray. Edit, to add that you do interact with your team, so if that is good, you can be insulated from the rest of Acme in that particular dimension (which is a big component of one's experience of working for any employer).