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"Challenging working environment where neat technical problems are still solved despite not being a startup" This phrasing makes me chuckle. Why's there a pres

"Challenging working environment where neat technical problems are still solved despite not being a startup" This phrasing makes me chuckle. Why's there a presumption that "neat technical problems" are the sole preserve of startups? If I were to make a generalization at all, I'd say a successful company with a solid customer base has a lot more areas of technical challenges (both new products as well improvement and scaling of existing products) than a small startup, (especially when those small startups are in the consumer space where product features/design and customer support are far more important than sheer technical solutions).

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
It isn't that large companies don't do interesting things, it's that they also do a lot of horribly uninteresting things. Large companies often have large customers (e.g. governments) with obtuse and inflexible requirements, internal politics that restrict what you can invent, legacy code bases that have to be maintained and/or transitioned away from, etc. There is no doubt a whole team of people at Microsoft whose jobs are to make and test patches for Windows Vista. Those people are surely well-compensated for their work, but they're not exactly changing the world.
deanmoriarty 13y ago
You are right, reading the sentence again it doesn't make sense at all. I definitely confused "technical problems" solved by the company mission vs the feeling of excitement and freedom that a single developer gets solving a "technical problem" in a typical early stage startup.
- ProblemFactory 13y ago
  I agree with chetanahuja that there are more "single developer's technical problems" in established software companies rather than startups. During my time at Google, there was an engineer next to me working full-time on GCC, because found compilers most fun and technically challenging. On the open-source version, not a private branch or anything. Very few startups would have the scale and stability to allow an employee to work on something that maybe delivers 5% faster code or 5% faster build times in a few year's time.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago

It isn't that large companies don't do interesting things, it's that they also do a lot of horribly uninteresting things. Large companies often have large customers (e.g. governments) with obtuse and inflexible requirements, internal politics that restrict what you can invent, legacy code bases that have to be maintained and/or transitioned away from, etc. There is no doubt a whole team of people at Microsoft whose jobs are to make and test patches for Windows Vista. Those people are surely well-compensated for their work, but they're not exactly changing the world.

deanmoriarty 13y ago

You are right, reading the sentence again it doesn't make sense at all. I definitely confused "technical problems" solved by the company mission vs the feeling of excitement and freedom that a single developer gets solving a "technical problem" in a typical early stage startup.

ProblemFactory 13y ago
I agree with chetanahuja that there are more "single developer's technical problems" in established software companies rather than startups. During my time at Google, there was an engineer next to me working full-time on GCC, because found compilers most fun and technically challenging. On the open-source version, not a private branch or anything. Very few startups would have the scale and stability to allow an employee to work on something that maybe delivers 5% faster code or 5% faster build times in a few year's time.