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A comment on /story/34366610. Parent comment

Re: by Trasmatta on Friday January 13, 2023 @11:19AM (#34369899)
What are these unicorn companies? I've worked at 7 companies (and interviewed at many more) and never seen anything close to this mythical "company that values programming and real productivity". I feel like they must be exceptionally rare.
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Re: by 411111111111111 on Friday January 13, 2023 @11:28AM (#34370034)
The term unicorn in this context makes it hard to understand what you're asking, as unicorn companies are usually defined to be corporations with i believe a billion in revenue. This often comes with the usual downsides.

Smallish companies often leave a lot more freedom for their developers, but you'll most likely also be missing a lot of things you've gotten used to (highly automated CI/CD, teams "responsible" for each part of the system etc)

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Re: by at_compile_time on Friday January 13, 2023 @01:51PM (#34372153)
They're referring to the mythical animal, using a metaphor to express that such a company is mythical or non-existent. Coincidentally, this is same metaphor that the person who coined the term "unicorn company" was using.

Given that private companies with over $1B in revenue actually exist while examples of "[companies] that values programming and real productivity" are yet to be forthcoming, the parent post is using the metaphor correctly and the finance world is not.

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Re: by ss108 on Friday January 13, 2023 @11:34AM (#34370134)
How diverse have the companies you've worked at been in terms of size, etc?

As a perhaps incomplete or shoddy heuristic, smaller startups tend to focus on productivity and moving fast.

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Re: by kasey_junk on Friday January 13, 2023 @11:43AM (#34370275)
I’ve worked at about 10 companies and half of them didn’t have the soul sucking processes (though all of them did have process).

The correlation I see is big companies have processes that kill productivity, though I did work for a big company that was able to avoid it for a long time (new leadership did end up killing productivity right before I left).

And for what it’s worth there was no correlation with “agile”. I’ve seen good and bad agile.

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Re: by Aeolun on Saturday January 14, 2023 @12:48AM (#34377672)
The only ones that I’ve found like that are the ones in which either the company, or the team, is led by a former/current programmer.
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