This is not a warning to avoid large corporations, just an observation ... When you work at BigCo, your daily activities and your goals involve operating the m

This is not a warning to avoid large corporations, just an observation ... When you work at BigCo, your daily activities and your goals involve operating the machine that BigCo is, and becoming part of that machine. You may be a programmer, or software engineer, or technical staff member, or Sales Guy or Web Dude[1]. You may code in some language or collate TPS reports. But your main job is to serve the machine, regardless of what the machine produces. At SmallCo success is defined and recognizable by shipping, internally or externally. At BigCo success is defined and recognizable by how many people know you, and how many weeks of vacation your grade is given. Do you work at BigCo or SmallCo? William Least Heat Moon, in Blue Highways[2], had a rule for guessing whether a restaurant was going to be good or generic, and that was to count wall calendars; the more calendars, the better the restaurant[3]. You can recognize BigCo by sheer physical size, but also by walking around the cubes and counting company certificates on cube walls. The more certificates of relationship training, management training and Microsoft training that you find, the Bigger the Co. Those certificates are there because those employees are learning and demonstrating the skills of operating, and being a cog in, BigCo. You can also recognize how far into the machine individuals have progressed, by measuring the ratio of animal books[4] to certificates. [1] http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/ http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Highways https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Highways [3] http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/431488 http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/431488 [4] http://oreilly.com/ http://oreilly.com/