Don’t conflate corporate size with engineering competency. It’s counter-intuitive, but oh so common to see this. That’s why so many engineers want to work for start ups!

> Don’t conflate corporate size with engineering competency. It’s counter-intuitive, but oh so common to see this. That’s why so many engineers want to work for start ups!

I thought start ups were all about letting tech debt pile up like there's no tomorrow, since there might literally be no tomorrow for them.

The truth of the matter is that I've never seen anywhere where this isn't the case to some degree. Long term thinking is rare.

I think it's very safe to assume the level of technical rigor in a given undertaking just falls to the minimum required unless there's a very strong force keeping it in a higher state. Maybe places like NASA JPL or Apple manage to float above the minimum because of a really unified and powerful culture, but outside of that I'm thinking it's more or less universal. e.g. the 737 MAX debacle illustrates Boeing's stochastic search for the lower bound of technical rigor when it comes to flight control software quality.

> I think it's very safe to assume the level of technical rigor in a given undertaking just falls to the minimum required unless there's a very strong force keeping it in a higher state.

It really depends on who's setting the tone. If it's an owner or manager taking an active interest, I think your observation is true.

> Maybe places like NASA JPL or Apple manage to float above the minimum because of a really unified and powerful culture, but outside of that I'm thinking it's more or less universal. e.g. the 737 MAX debacle illustrates Boeing's stochastic search for the lower bound of technical rigor when it comes to flight control software quality.

IIRC, Boeing has made a years-long effort to cripple their unionized engineering workforce. I don't remember exactly where I read this, but for a long time they had a very effective, rigorous organization, but management (from McDonnell Douglas. IIRC) make a lot of changes that messed it up.

Bloomberg Quicktake (which is one of the few news outlet Youtube channels I recommend) did a good 20 minutes piece on Boeing's internal cultural demise [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EESYomdoeCs

I had an experience at a startup where the team was mostly experienced people who had been at larger companies and didn't tend to cut corners. It was a pretty good balance. We focused on doing the job well but didn't have big company meeting culture, etc.

I wouldn't want to work at a place like you described.

The org is getting what it wants out of the team; why would they fix it?

As long as you've got meat for the grinder, you can keep making sausage.

Also: the cruelty is the point.

I'd disagree with that.

One doesn't need to be cruel to be callous or oblivious.

One can intentionally remain oblivious, but that doesn't imply that the cruelty is an actual goal.

See also people who happily eat meat (myself included) who are still troubled (as a 5th order concern) by the process.

I think this is because Amazon loves to churn teams.

My team, not Amazon, had alot of churn when I joined. Basically a full turn over within a year. We lost alot of institutional knowledge and had to reverse engineer stuff all over the place.

American capitalism is built on employee heroics, but at least you can get the AWS stamp on your resie, which, let's be honest, will make you the "it" girl of job hunting.

This works when the company is hot, but eventually it's not. When the last time you saw HP, or IBM positively on a resume?

Big companies breed big company problems that can leave engineers poorly equipped for the rapid delivery world of startups/scaleups.

As someone with one of those two on his resume, I'd say you are not wrong.

That said, it's a bit more nuanced. It still looks good if you can share experiences that prove why it's good.

Ex. "I learned what it's like to be closer to the cutting edge in some respects, but I also learned how that should be secondary to delivering a good product and good customer service due to issues X, Y, Z observed. Also, using technology A is great, but it might not be worth your investment at current stage."

This kind of statement illustrates that you learned multiple things of value, and hopefully avoided bad habits and are pragmatic and worth having. It's possible they can leverage your experience to avoid making mistakes in the next growth stage.

So, yes, it doesn't always look good immediately. It's up to you to prove to a questioner why it was good and hopefully they also agree.

"HP" or "IBM" carry a lot more weight on a resume than something like "BF Consulting Ltd"

"Big companies breed big company problems that can leave engineers poorly equipped for the rapid delivery world of startups/scaleups. "

Why are big company employees not suited (or trained for?) to startup like environments?

There are several reasons big company experience doesn't translate.

1. Legacy tech, "cool" big companies have the latest stacks but over time these stacks become old and the dev practices atrophy. The biggest cases of this I've seen are engineers unable/unwilling to do their own QA as its "not their job". Or unwilling to adapt to new technology the startup may be using.

2. Politics: Big tech companies have major politics leading to pathological "not our problem" conditions. Efficient and successful startups/scale-ups need to minimize politics, and some employees from big tech companies will have found this to be one of their primary skills.

3. Ambiguity/Timeline constraints/dealing with crap: At a big tech company everyone is expected to be at the top of their game and the company rarely faces deadlines that are not self-imposed. An engineer may expect 100% test coverage, crystal clear product requirements, and no risk of failure. Dealing with sub-optimal conditions is common in startups/high growth companies.

4. Definition of success: A big company may strongly value marginal contributions as prized wins. Shaving ms off of a frequent call can drive real monetary improvements when the company has hundreds of millions of customers. Making engineers marginally more productive has huge benefits when you have 50k+ engineers. Startups often just don't care about these things and simply won't value the skills necessary for this work in most cases.

On the flip side there are great engineers/managers who learned what made the big company successful and how to navigate internal obstacles. These employees are likely to be gold to a startup, but they are also gold to a well capitalized company with vastly more data on just how effective they are than a startup has. Odds are, startups are interviewing/hiring the employees the big companies don't care about - something the hiring firm often implicitly knows.

I think you overestimate the appeal of a handful of large companies, taken by itself, on a resume if only because they come with downsides as well.

The level of abuse and mismanagement I put up with before I got older is pretty shocking. Young people have a much higher tolerance for BS, in many cases because they don't have enough experience to know that their workplace is broken.

Or worse, they may internalize it as normal and unreflexively continue breeding the problem. Those olderish managers of young people were young people themselves, once.

Yeah, it's much easier to end up in a malfunctioning workplace than a good one. The number of healthy workplaces where everything seems to just work is shockingly small, and you are actually lucky to end up in ONE through an entire career. And then you can never go back.

but what's the point?