A fun write-up, about the experience of operating at $ENTERPRISE as a software engineer coming from a different world. A lot of it is painfully accurate and recognizable to me. Fake urgency is...
A fun write-up, about the experience of operating at $ENTERPRISE as a software engineer coming from a different world. A lot of it is painfully accurate and recognizable to me.
Fake urgency is very recognizable, luckily only in a problematic way for one organization I worked for where everything was urgent all the time. In most other organizations I have worked in it is a thing but very manageable.
The different empires doing things wildly different is also a thing. Made even more interesting when the empires think they are all following the same (higher up mandated) process but have wildly different takes on how it should be executed.
I worked for two medium businesses, two startups, and now Capital One. I share the authors difficulty getting up to speed on the ne wsong and dance, but not the nitty gritty details. Yes, I have...
I worked for two medium businesses, two startups, and now Capital One. I share the authors difficulty getting up to speed on the ne wsong and dance, but not the nitty gritty details.
Yes, I have to go through 4 different support channels when stuff breaks, but given the tighter constraints on scale, security, reputation, etc, we move at a very healthy pace. My most recent product launch was 3 months from concept to production.
This is because my $ENTERPRISE was shit a few years back and they have invested heavily into "bottom up" egnineering where each part of the stack is relevant, maintained, and generally solving one problem. For example, my product was a data streaming kinda thing. I didn't have to setup Kafka clusters, flink jobs, etc by hand because we have APIs for publishing data that just kinda work. We have an internal terraform kinda thing that lets me writ eup maybe 30 or 40 lines of config and I've got my infrastructure.
All this is to say, large corporations become complacent. Once the money printer is in place, it's very easy to have exactly what happened to op happen. From what I've seen, Capital One is actively strategizing top down in healthy meaningful ways. I suppose I'll say I can only speak as an engineer. I'm sure we have hundreds of miscellaneous office jobs that are just like what op deals with.
This confirms my decision to chose to work for small to medium sized companies. I would go insane in such an environment. Though as the company grows, we do need to be aware to avoid the worst...
This confirms my decision to chose to work for small to medium sized companies. I would go insane in such an environment. Though as the company grows, we do need to be aware to avoid the worst downsides of becoming a larger organization.
This is also partially how these little empires come to be. They effectively operate as smaller organisations isolating a lot of the people in them from the insanity that is the larger enterprise....
This is also partially how these little empires come to be. They effectively operate as smaller organisations isolating a lot of the people in them from the insanity that is the larger enterprise.
Which can work out nicely for many people. But becomes problematic once they need to engage with other empires with the expectation that they are compatible.
First startup I was at was a real rocket ship. I saw it quadruple 75 to 300 employees. It was downright fascinating to see that transition from small to medium and the growing pains thereof. The...
First startup I was at was a real rocket ship. I saw it quadruple 75 to 300 employees. It was downright fascinating to see that transition from small to medium and the growing pains thereof.
The author of this article bemoaned not being able to shout over a desk "hey Kathy what's this error?" And that approach is good and all, but it doesn't scale when Kathy has 400 employees using her service.
The biggest thing I learned from that job was the incredible difficulty of balancing technical debt versus velocity (especially when starting from nothing). So, so many questionable choices ranging from, holy hell, that added a year of work down the line to fine, sure, the performance is shit but it made it to the big client demo and made $75K in ARR.
My only job so far has been in a SME (the company itself is a big enterprise, but the engineering team is independent and fairly small), and yet it still somehow managed to have many of the...
My only job so far has been in a SME (the company itself is a big enterprise, but the engineering team is independent and fairly small), and yet it still somehow managed to have many of the problems described here, even if on a smaller scare. I guess this just shows how important (and rare) good leadership is.
Also, I have a feeling ThePrimeagen is gonna love this one
Man sorry to bring negativity but primagen rubs me the wrong way. He comes off extremely cargo culty. He's right more than wrong but his reasoning is more religious than scientific IME
Man sorry to bring negativity but primagen rubs me the wrong way. He comes off extremely cargo culty. He's right more than wrong but his reasoning is more religious than scientific IME
A fun write-up, about the experience of operating at $ENTERPRISE as a software engineer coming from a different world. A lot of it is painfully accurate and recognizable to me.
Fake urgency is very recognizable, luckily only in a problematic way for one organization I worked for where everything was urgent all the time. In most other organizations I have worked in it is a thing but very manageable.
The different empires doing things wildly different is also a thing. Made even more interesting when the empires think they are all following the same (higher up mandated) process but have wildly different takes on how it should be executed.
I worked for two medium businesses, two startups, and now Capital One. I share the authors difficulty getting up to speed on the ne wsong and dance, but not the nitty gritty details.
Yes, I have to go through 4 different support channels when stuff breaks, but given the tighter constraints on scale, security, reputation, etc, we move at a very healthy pace. My most recent product launch was 3 months from concept to production.
This is because my $ENTERPRISE was shit a few years back and they have invested heavily into "bottom up" egnineering where each part of the stack is relevant, maintained, and generally solving one problem. For example, my product was a data streaming kinda thing. I didn't have to setup Kafka clusters, flink jobs, etc by hand because we have APIs for publishing data that just kinda work. We have an internal terraform kinda thing that lets me writ eup maybe 30 or 40 lines of config and I've got my infrastructure.
All this is to say, large corporations become complacent. Once the money printer is in place, it's very easy to have exactly what happened to op happen. From what I've seen, Capital One is actively strategizing top down in healthy meaningful ways. I suppose I'll say I can only speak as an engineer. I'm sure we have hundreds of miscellaneous office jobs that are just like what op deals with.
This confirms my decision to chose to work for small to medium sized companies. I would go insane in such an environment. Though as the company grows, we do need to be aware to avoid the worst downsides of becoming a larger organization.
This is also partially how these little empires come to be. They effectively operate as smaller organisations isolating a lot of the people in them from the insanity that is the larger enterprise.
Which can work out nicely for many people. But becomes problematic once they need to engage with other empires with the expectation that they are compatible.
First startup I was at was a real rocket ship. I saw it quadruple 75 to 300 employees. It was downright fascinating to see that transition from small to medium and the growing pains thereof.
The author of this article bemoaned not being able to shout over a desk "hey Kathy what's this error?" And that approach is good and all, but it doesn't scale when Kathy has 400 employees using her service.
The biggest thing I learned from that job was the incredible difficulty of balancing technical debt versus velocity (especially when starting from nothing). So, so many questionable choices ranging from, holy hell, that added a year of work down the line to fine, sure, the performance is shit but it made it to the big client demo and made $75K in ARR.
My only job so far has been in a SME (the company itself is a big enterprise, but the engineering team is independent and fairly small), and yet it still somehow managed to have many of the problems described here, even if on a smaller scare. I guess this just shows how important (and rare) good leadership is.
Also, I have a feeling ThePrimeagen is gonna love this one
Man sorry to bring negativity but primagen rubs me the wrong way. He comes off extremely cargo culty. He's right more than wrong but his reasoning is more religious than scientific IME