Benefits and limitations of working for a big company

Hi, mates. Today I’d like to give an honest review of my experience of working for a big company. Last years I tend to notice that there’s a bunch of processes that affects the efficiency, motivation, self-perception and other important things so I decided to describe some of the aspects. Of course it isn’t supposed to be true among all the big companies you may work for. It’s only about bad symptoms. Let’s talk more in detail.

What makes me worry?

Being a software engineer for 2+ years I got used to dive deeply into development process. It’s the real art: you can create your own world in computer. No matter how difficult it is, it just lives by its own rules, those you write in code. Which was fine, until I realized I can’t ignore processes outside my development area. So it really needs to be considered: requests for a local admin group rights on your computer, requests for a change of some system, environment, access to any tools like CI server or static code analysis server, that takes a lot of time. And moreover some of those centralized services tend to be unavailable from time to time because of a recurrent maintenance work. Let’s imagine another situation: there’s a shortage of employees in your company. And the worst thing is when you have to involve additional efforts to compensate for a lack of competencies. For example, there is a need for a skillful systems analyst. All of your tasks in issue tracking system look like a mess: no mapping between domain objects and SQL tables, no logic explained; it’s just a business task that needs to be analyzed by corresponding systems analyst. So yeah, instead of efficient work you get pain doing something different.

Motivation of your team

Every time you get hired somewhere you feel like you can change something in your team. New employee is a new blood, he wants to be useful, he changes the development process in a positive way, he knows he really means something to company. But the reality is different. He loses motivation and passion as time goes on. Yeah, he surely gets promoted over time, but it just only makes him indifferent to his feelings. That’s why it’s so hard to build an engineering culture as you entered a well-established team.

What can I do?

Change the company. Try to recognize those symptoms every time you get introduced to a new team after an interview.