I'm guessing when most people [on HN] are comparing big companies to startups they're thinking of tech companies. What you describe may not be unusual for large non-tech companies - but it's pretty horrible compared to large tech ones.

If it's feasible you may want to consider looking for a new job. [And FWIW some great advice I got when starting out as a developer was never work where software is a cost-center].

This cost-center point is key. I work for one of the big international electronics corps as an enterprise web dev, but they have no interest in the quality of our work. They don't understand it, they have no belief in codebase maintainability (everything is new development or bugfix, basically as soon as an app is written it becomes frozen legacy code that will sit for 5+ years until a rewrite is finally budgeted).

A lot of the superiors they hire really affect the architectural policies of the company. For example, we can use Spring & jQuery but little else. Now they are trying to write apps with heavier front-end & getting into trouble cuz its a mess of jQuery callbacks with no real js framework. Why? The main architect has never heard of React, Angular, backbone, etc. (not to mention the fact that I'm one of like 2 devs who can actually write js, and unfortunately the other does not possess the equally rare skill: "uses proper design patterns"). You'd think I was joking until you met a bunch of corporate consultant programmers.

Basically, these companies try to boil web development into an old-school "IT" process but the level of intellect is astonishingly low. I've been lookin for a new gig at a tech company for quite a while but it was tough to make a change cuz this is my first gig out of grad school, had to prove myself a bit & build resume.

The only relief is that the corp "cost-center" IT kindof job I have is such a mess that its a good place to study & relax, pace of work is veeeeery slow.

> I've been lookin for a new gig at a tech company for quite a while but it was tough to make a change cuz this is my first gig out of grad school, had to prove myself a bit & build resume.

Why not try to apply for some jobs now? You don't know how good your resume is until you try it

heh thanks for the words of encouragement. i'm going to try now, yes. but basically.... to be fair i'm getting paid a pretty good wage so i really just need some experience to avoid looking like a dabbler. I'm looking at senior level positions now & they seem to want to see that you're really committed to a certain type of code.

I went from research Matlab / dabbling in C# at a dayjob, to RoR, to javascript, to now pretty hardcore backend Java (EE, Spring, high concurrency for last 2 yrs), trying to move into Clojure a bit more. Most well-funded companies don't seem to like polyglots from what I can tell... But yeah I will be looking for the ones that do, plus I am studying C++ to make a bit of a more lateral move into audio digital signal processing / data-mining / machine learning.

I don't know... companies tell me I'm too expensive for the level of experience I have, yet all the high-paid seniors I work with are awful so I don't want to lower my salary expectations unless I can find a company thats actually worth sacrificing for.