[HN Gopher] A megacorp is not your dream job
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A megacorp is not your dream job
Author : ddevault
Score : 72 points
Date : 2021-01-01 21:32 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (drewdevault.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (drewdevault.com)
| analognoise wrote:
| I'd work for the devil himself for 500k/year, and just convince
| myself he was misunderstood.
|
| "Blood on your hands" - oh boo-boo.
|
| Blood washes out.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I sometimes browse jobs boards for no reason except to see if
| there's anything cool out there. Bluntly, 99% of jobs I see from
| any company look absolutely dreadful. The rare occasion I see a
| job that makes me think "damn that would be a cool thing to work
| on" tends to be at one of these megacorps. The one's that aren't
| tend be be gate kept by things I can't simply acquire.
| Admittedly, I'm in no state to pass a leetcode interview atm.,
| but it seems a hell of a lot easier to grind that for a few
| months that anything else.
| underwater wrote:
| I've worked at a dozen companies from two-person dev shops,
| legacy enterprise companies, all the way up to a FAANG as it
| scaled from 5k to 30k people.
|
| The FAANG "megacorp" was my absolute favourite job. I learned
| more, had more impact, made more money, and boosted my own career
| further than anywhere else I've worked.
|
| Large corporations are not the Evil Co. from your Saturday
| morning cartoons. Yes, they have immense power, but from what
| I've seen unethical behaviour and treating employees like shit
| are more common in non-tech or smaller, dead end, companies.
| jfim wrote:
| > a FAANG as it scaled from 5k to 30k people
|
| It might be a different experience joining when the FAANG is
| already at 30k people though. More protobuf engineering and
| less "hey let's try this completely new thing."
| crmrc114 wrote:
| Yeah, see that is when I joined a FAANG. So it was basically
| the Borg collective- you, mindless drone repair plamsa
| conduit x347B.
|
| I was not able to use my creativity and problem solving and
| it was soul killing. I am now back in Small-Mid Enterprise
| and I love it. I get to design solutions from the ground up,
| sell them to other teams and build consensus then slam
| through development and implementation. So I guess my lesson
| was, never join a megacorp again- people are expendable there
| and there is no value placed on their individuality.
| zcw100 wrote:
| One of the problems is people don't stick around for their entire
| career. They know a lot of the work is unfulfilling. They stick
| around for long enough that their departure doesn't look like
| they were fired and try to obscure it in something innocuous
| like, "I was looking for something more challenging" and the
| recruiter thinks,"wow, more challenging than Google?!? This
| candidate must be hot". The amount of status these people enjoy
| in their careers after leaving is amazing. After that they're
| captured. They're never going to tell you the truth about what
| it's like working for Google. They gain an enormous cache from
| having worked there.
|
| The amount of respect I afford these people is inversely
| proportional to the amount of time it takes them to say where
| they worked or went to school. Went to MIT and don't ever manage
| to bring it up in a conversation and I have to learn it from
| someone else? Massive respect, but they usually mention it in the
| first 30 seconds.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| *cachet
| amelius wrote:
| > One of the problems is people don't stick around for their
| entire career.
|
| This is what I don't understand about people working for a
| company that builds silos or walled gardens. You always know
| that one day you are not working for that company anymore and
| you will be outside the silo/garden, and the company will
| effectively work against you (or against your entire
| profession) in ways you perhaps did not anticipate.
|
| These companies pretend they have an "engineering" culture. But
| the policies of these companies show very little of that. When
| do these engineers wake up?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| For me the sufficient reason is in the second paragraph
|
| _You will have little to no meaningful autonomy, impact, or
| influence._
|
| This is pretty much by definition true if the place you work at
| hits a certain size, you become an ant in an anthill, hyper-
| specialized with no meaningful holistic task.
|
| Life is too short to move things in and out of protobufs for a
| living, I'd rather live in a garage like a broke college student
| and have some agency in a five person company and see an entire
| project through and do interesting work rather than fixing the
| pipes on some gigantic monolith.
|
| I read that Airbnb blogpost recently about moving to react native
| and back and I can only imagine the amount of hours of human life
| that were wasted in meetings alone makes Kafka's novels look
| harmless, why do people do this to themselves.
| zem wrote:
| i work in a megacorp, in developer tooling. so in some sense
| i'm fixing the pipes, and nothing i do is even remotely related
| to any of the company's core products. but on the other hand my
| primary project has a three-person team, we have tons of
| autonomy, and a pretty large impact on code quality and
| developer experience across the company. plus most of what i do
| is open-sourced, and there is a lot of engagement with the open
| source community at large. and this year i'm going to expand my
| role to spend some time contributing to the cpython
| interpreter, which my manager is very supportive of.
|
| this pretty much _is_ my dream job; everyone 's dream doesn't
| have to include having visible user-facing impact or being part
| of product development. also the work-life balance is great; i
| get to put in my hours at work and actually be able to make
| plans that involve leaving at a reasonable time, which was not
| the case when i worked at a startup.
| tayo42 wrote:
| > Life is too short to move things in and out of protobufs for
| a living, I'd rather live in a garage like a broke college
| student and have some agency in a five person company and see
| an entire project through and do interesting work rather than
| fixing the pipes on some gigantic monolith.
|
| This is really just dependent on whats important to you. If
| spending all your waking hours in front of a computer writing
| commercial software is how you want to spend your life than
| sure work at a small company that will become your identity. Or
| write plumbing, get paid well, and live a well balanced life,
| one thats not dominated by work.(I think the language to
| describe the scenario emphasizes the spin on the scenario)
| amelius wrote:
| > (...) Or write plumbing, get paid well, and live a well
| balanced life, one thats not dominated by work.
|
| More than 1/2 of your awake life is spent working. So better
| make sure it is fulfilling.
| afavour wrote:
| I still think that's an overgeneralisation. I'd say make
| sure you can be _content_ with your work. But would I trade
| half the fulfilment for double the salary? You bet I would.
| My family could have a better life, I could do more
| exciting things in my spare time, I could even make sure my
| children have a better education, etc etc.
|
| It all goes back to what the OP was saying: it depends
| what's most important to you.
| StavrosK wrote:
| > This is pretty much by definition true if the place you work
| at hits a certain size, you become an ant in an anthill, hyper-
| specialized with no meaningful holistic task.
|
| This size is much smaller than a megacorp, though, at around
| 100 people you'll either have very little user-influencing work
| or you'll be working on such small features that they won't be
| very noticeable.
| falcolas wrote:
| Exactly. Even on a team of 10, unless you're especially
| outspoken, you're not going to be heard very often.
| chefkoch wrote:
| >why do people do this to themselves.
|
| Lots of money.
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| All of the criticisms of megacorps listed here are just as
| applicable to startups (especially with any whiff of VC funding)
| and mid-sized companies, _without_ competitive compensation.
|
| You very likely _won't_ be happier at other tech companies,
| because despite promises of career growth, autonomy, greater
| responsibility and company mission, it will just be the same
| ruthless corporate shilling, just with worse hours, worse
| vacation, worse pay, and worthless lottery-like equity.
|
| I urge a lot of caution. The only reason to work at a startup
| (all other constraints like visa issues, geolocation preferences,
| etc., being equal), is because you have absolute faith in the
| core business model.
|
| Choosing to work at a startup because of the technologies you
| will supposedly use, the seniority of the role you'll supposedly
| be given, the fun-seeming optics and kid-like atmosphere, lack of
| dress code, etc., is a massive, massive mistake - not because
| those preferences are wrong, but because startups absolutely
| don't fulfill them. They just pay lip service to it.
|
| For 90% of employees, the choice is purely between medium-corp
| and mega-corp, based on your relative appraisal of work/life
| balance and compensation.
|
| It would be great if this were different and the charismatic
| nature of startups really did offer offsetting benefits through
| learning, autonomy, etc. But that is just across the board a
| total false promise bill of lies in startup marketing to bait &
| switch tech workers they otherwise can't afford on the basis of
| market compensation.
| opportune wrote:
| I don't really think these are compelling arguments, since at
| least for me, the only better thing than working for a megacorp
| as far as finances and QOL would be running my own company _and
| succeeding_ which is substantially riskier.
|
| >If you quit, remember that they will have forced you to sign an
| NDA and a non-compete.
|
| Not really likely considering there is a huge revolving door
| between all the major tech companies. There is also a risk I get
| hit by a car on the way to work.
|
| >You will probably be much happier at a small to mid-size
| company. The "dream job" megacorps have sold you on is just good
| marketing.
|
| Actually I've worked on interesting, highly used stuff at
| megacorps in mature work environments, and was paid much more
| than most random small companies would. The concept of a "dream
| job" doesn't exist, neither in big companies or small companies,
| IMO.
|
| >They could hurt you, and they could make you hurt others.
|
| I could just leave and get another job at any time. I don't
| understand why this author is so paranoid.
| abdabab wrote:
| > ... and they could make you hurt others
|
| This is the part you missed. You can't easily walk away from
| that.
| WJW wrote:
| Did you not read the part in the GP where he said "I could
| just leave and get another job at any time."? How is that not
| easily walking away from it?
| opportune wrote:
| I don't see how that's possible. I could just quit if I felt
| I was doing something unethical. It is easy to get hired as a
| software engineer, though if you are on a restrictive work
| visa "just quitting" becomes a much harder decision.
| ddevault wrote:
| You are doing something unethical. You are directly
| supporting an unethical business and generating at least as
| much revenue for them as the salary you take home. You have
| sold your soul, quite literally. You don't believe this
| because questioning it would call into question your own
| self-image as an upstanding person, it's a basic human bias
| that prevents you from confronting it.
|
| I'm not saying you aren't an upstanding person in general.
| I am saying that you are doing something wrong, and bias
| prevents you from recognizing or admitting it, even to
| yourself. You _can 't_ just quit, because quitting would be
| admitting that you're wrong. And that's hard to do!
| edmundsauto wrote:
| Your perspective requires agreeing with a specific
| interpretation that is just your opinion, then is wrapped
| into an accusatory tone that is unlikely to be
| particularly effective at getting OP to consider any
| changes that you think they should make.
| ssklash wrote:
| I feel like you skipped the most compelling reason. I posted it
| in this thread already, but it's the abhorrent behavior that
| these companies routinely engage in and the harm they cause,
| enabled by well-meaning engineers who just want to solve
| problems and do interesting work.
| opportune wrote:
| Yeah, the issue with that is that for most megacorps only one
| or two of those criticisms are valid. I've definitely refused
| to work at companies (like Facebook) on the grounds that I
| think they are doing much more harm than good in the world.
| But there are also megacorps which I consider to be doing
| less harm per capita than other technology businesses which I
| would work for.
|
| Part of the issue is that media companies have darlings and
| enemies that they don't really cover proportionately to their
| offenses, IMO (for example if Google even considers doing any
| business in China - uproar. But Bing actively sells out
| Chinese users to the Chinese government and nobody cars,
| because right now Microsoft is a media darling). And the
| media doesn't write about smaller companies doing bad things
| usually, unless they are particularly bad, because they fail
| the "who cares" test.
|
| There is also an inherent chaos that comes with companies
| with hundreds of thousands of employees - bad people will get
| through hiring and do bad things, people will make very high
| impact mistakes, things become uncoordinated. So for me
| personally I try to think of companies in terms of badness-
| per-capita and whether the rot is coming from the top
| (Facebook) or is seemingly "random".
| ddevault wrote:
| Author here. This post wasn't written for you. People who have
| already drunk the kool-aid need a much different approach to
| break their cognative dissonance.
| opportune wrote:
| Ok. To be more blunt I think many of the things you have
| written are simply not true, or are at least not broadly
| applicable.
| ddevault wrote:
| Are you unable to recognize that you're a fish telling the
| birds that there's no such thing as the ocean? You have a
| biased perspective.
| [deleted]
| rossjudson wrote:
| Your response, like your article, is essentially useless.
| You have massively overgeneralized, telling an elementary
| schoolchild's story.
|
| Is a city bad or good? It is both. Complexity is
| unavoidable. Different experiences in a large corporation
| happen.
|
| I've personally seen counterexamples to every single
| point you've made, and they are not isolated.
|
| Your failure to acknowledge that points directly at the
| most obvious bias -- your own.
| WJW wrote:
| Your own viewpoint is pretty biased too Drew. Your entire
| software philosophy is based on your own model of ethics
| and admitting that the software megacorps might not be
| the very epitome of evil would invalidate most of the
| reasons for the existence of sourcehut and your other
| projects.
|
| I hope you continue to explore other places in the design
| space, but calling people evil because you disagree with
| them makes people disengage. It makes you look like just
| another zealot screaming his viewpoint into the uncaring
| masses.
| ddevault wrote:
| I have called no one evil. I have spoken of _behaviors_
| that I believe are unethical, and necessarily if someone
| in this thread is doing these behaviors then they may be
| offended by this. If we are unwilling to talk about
| ethics for the risk of offending someone who doesn 't
| meet them, then we are inevitably going to fail to uphold
| our ethics at all.
|
| Some of the stuff megacorps are doing is so unethical
| that we would use it as a grandiose example for the
| purpose of debate. If there is a point at which it's
| acceptable to call behavior out as unethical, and we
| aren't there yet, then I don't know where it is.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| That's an amazingly rude and closed-minded viewpoint.
| Everybody who disagrees with you is wrong, by definition. Any
| respect I had for what you had written is shattered. Instead
| I see this as childish anger.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Sorry, but responding to criticism with "you've drunk the
| kool-aid" is a sure-fire way of never correcting incorrect
| things you say/believe.
|
| I worked at a megacorp in big tech for many years. They do
| not have non-compete clauses (and I'm in a state that allows
| them). I also never signed an NDA with them. People leave
| them all the time after disputes and not one that I know of
| suffered after they left. You contradict yourself in talking
| about how hell bent megacorps are in making money, and then
| talk about them spending 100x your salary on lawyers to go
| after you. Sorry, most "you's" are not worth even 10% of your
| salary to go after. You leave, and both you and the company
| move on.
|
| > They could hurt you, and they could make you hurt others.
| Don't fall for their propaganda.
|
| This is definitely true, but as the GP said, it's quite
| simple to leave if you this is the concern. While there, I
| interviewed for an internal position that involved work for
| China that sounded to me like part of their mass surveillance
| program. I don't really know if that was the case, but it was
| trivial for me to decline their offer.
|
| And I've found _plenty_ of non-megacorps involved in hurting
| others. They merely do not have the scale that big megacorps
| do.
|
| It sounds like you're conflating Internet companies, and
| FAANG, with megacorps. Most megacorps are not one of these.
|
| Some people do get to do very interesting work, although
| broadly speaking, you are correct - you are most likely going
| to be a cog in someone else's dream job.
|
| They occasionally do invest in people. They gave a coworker
| $50K to get an MBA (which cost a lot more, but they did
| contribute a nice sum), with no strings attached. He left
| soon after getting the MBA. They really _shouldn 't_ be this
| nice.
|
| As for autonomy, it does seem independent of size. My last
| job at that company had quite a bit of autonomy. I got to
| pick the tech stack. Work wasn't assigned to me - I had to go
| examine the needs of the department and propose solutions -
| make prototypes and if it seemed useful then make it into an
| internal product.
|
| > You will probably be much happier at a small to mid-size
| company.
|
| Compared to where I worked, most of these companies in my
| area have some combination of these:
|
| 1. Pay less (and I don't get FAANG salaries - perhaps 60% or
| less)
|
| 2. Work you as much if not more (my life in megacorp had good
| work/life balance - and when it didn't, I'd simply do an
| internal transfer).
|
| 3. Are less stable
|
| 4. Are more at the mercy of market forces, often making it
| equally unlikely you'll get to do cool work. The need to pay
| the bills is greater.
|
| I've found that there is almost some sort of conservation law
| at work. As an example, most small companies where I find
| average people do real interesting work get paid pennies (as
| in, many of them could qualify for food stamps). Ditto for
| work/life balance. A friend worked a tech job in a medium
| company where he'd routinely go home at 3:30pm. Pay was
| average, but he had to pay almost all of his insurance (quite
| a bit for a family of 4). He nevertheless was happy with the
| compromise of a lower salary.
|
| I'm not doubting tech companies exist that let me work in my
| city and are better on all these counts - just that they're
| harder to find and get into then big megacorp.
|
| Not all big megacorps are FAANG - in fact, most of them are
| not. Do not extrapolate from outliers.
| spicyramen wrote:
| The reason why I work for a mega corp is because of the salary
| and opportunities. I understand that they don't care about me, I
| don't want that they care about me, I care about the paycheck,
| stock options and bonus. Thanks to that i was able to buy my
| Model X, 1 house in Bay Area and 2 investment properties one in
| Austin and other in Financial District in Sao Paulo. I will
| continue to work for the evil corp because it brings economic
| benefit to me and my family, I don't care if my product is
| popular or not. I'm happy that my family has all they need
| the_only_law wrote:
| What level are you at in one of those companies to be able to
| afford all of that?
| BeetleB wrote:
| I can't speak about the house in the bay area, but everything
| else is very affordable even if not in a FAANG. Plenty of
| people in my much lower paying company have investment
| properties here and there. You need enough to pay the down
| payment, and need skills to find houses at a discount. If
| you're really good at it, you can find houses at incredible
| discounts (with lots of risks attached).
| jpollock wrote:
| Sounds like an average standard Senior Engineer salary level.
|
| If you don't sell your stock to live, wealth accelerates in a
| hurry.
| ddevault wrote:
| All of that is paid for in blood money. You are accountable to
| the business you work for. This comment reads like a drug lord
| bragging about their luxurious lifestyle.
| falcolas wrote:
| Your comments are getting more and more abusive towards those
| who are disagreeing with you. You doing OK?
| epsilonclose wrote:
| You may find that comment disagreeable, but it is hardly
| abusive. The neutered tone sung by most Hacker News
| castrati seems to have made folks forget what passion reads
| like.
| afavour wrote:
| I agree that it's not abusive but "blood money" and "drug
| lord" is pretty absurd language to use. I'm sure it's the
| result of passion but it undermines the point rather than
| aids it.
| ssklash wrote:
| "They may hurt you, but even worse, they will make you hurt
| others. You will be complicit in their ruthlessness. Privacy
| dragnets, union busting, monopolistic behavior and lobbying,
| faux-slavery of gig workers in domestic warehouses and actual-
| slavery of workers in foreign factories, answering to nations
| committing actual ongoing genocide -- this is only possible
| because highly skilled individuals like yourself chose to work
| for them, build their war chest, or even directly contribute to
| these efforts. Your salary may be a drop in the bucket to them,
| but consider how much that figure means to you. If you make that
| $500K, they spend 1.5x that after overhead, and they'd only do it
| if they expect a return on that investment. Would you give a
| corporation with this much blood on its hands $750K of your
| worth? Pocket change to them, maybe, but a lot of value to you,
| value that you could be adding somewhere else."
|
| I hope FANG employees recognize themselves in this paragraph.
| Where you work matters.
| kevinprince wrote:
| Not just where you work but the work you do.
| Shivetya wrote:
| I was originally going to reply with, when I was younger I had a
| similar concern, but you went off the rails with buzzword bingo
| with exaggerated issues as if they plague large corporations.
| Hell you can experience much of the same in any size corporation
| and even have them within your own business inadvertently.
|
| However I found that working for a Fortune 500 company to be both
| rewarding and comforting. I have been doing it for over two
| decades. I see the winds of change all the time but I also see
| incredible people I would have never met otherwise, new
| technologies that only were present because being so large we had
| teams for everything, and the opportunities expanded when working
| with large vendors who did not just ignore us or take us for
| granted.
|
| Are there issues working in a company which probably lost more in
| a backroom than they pay you. Sure. The key is knowing how to
| manage yourself and know the boundaries of your environment so
| that you don't because replaceable cog.
|
| You think megacorps are bad, well have you considered the
| gargantuan that is your Federal or State level government. Here
| are countless agencies and officials who supposedly are there to
| look out for you and all the others but no one actually holds
| them to that. You can try but you are not going to get far.
| Hiding behind Sovereign Immunity and even Qualified Immunity;
| which applies to all officials not just police; when they do
| something wrong or even illegal. Play side games with grant money
| to fund each other or writing contracts to hire friends and
| family for big money. No, corporations when they get large can be
| a threat to you if you work for them but government is a threat
| to everyone but who do you run to first and point fingers at
| someone else for them to act upon?
| ddevault wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
|
| This is Hacker News. This is an appeal to hackers, software
| engineers, tech workers - not government workers.
| jiqiren wrote:
| After doing small startups, government work (research @ JPL), and
| contract work.
|
| Megacorp is easily the best. That pay of nearly $500k/year is
| actually really really great.
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