Working at big companies sucks
I've worked at startups most of my life and I always had a good time there. Then, I jumped to walmart for higher pay and it was an extremely boring 4 months. I then jumped again to where I'm currently (big N) and it's even more boring. Every little change requires approval from so many people. Progress goes at a glacial pace. I have tons of pointless meetings all day every day. The work I'm doing is boring and insignificant. Im making over 250k and the perks are great, but I dont know how long I can handle working here. Ive been here 2 months for now and I'm beyond bored and tired of it all. I'll try and stick it out for a year, but I'm probably going to go back to the startup I was at before walmart, even if it is for 1/2 the pay of what im making now.
To each their own. Or, you could also try working for a company that doesn't suck. I mean, Walmart is not a tech company, Netflix is a tech-powered entertainment company. I have worked at both and I am not any less happy at msft than I was at a startup, doing a similar kind of work. Maybe, use your experience at this company to move to a better place in a year?
Im currently at G which is supposed to be good. I practically ran the dev department at the startup because I was the first software engineer. At G I'm just making small insignificant changes but being paid twice as much. I just dont think the red tape and beurocracy of big companies is for me
I thought I would do anything for some time for higher comp, it wasnt true. Wound up undermining my 10 minute walking commutes for a 40 minute driving commute and being told “just 40 minutes you’re lucky!” Uh sorry imbeciles your life sucks. And the company itself was in a generic no fun office park. Lasted 3 months and pumped my whole salary into 401k for like two paychecks and sold the car right after
Im at G and it's just not for me. Maybe the team is a wrong choice for me, but overall not very happy here
30-40% of people at google work for internal tooling...and not really business. Impactful things. But damn internal tooling at google is great. Google is very much a rest and vest kind of place shrug. I do think it still hires the best/smartest people. But there aren’t that many interesting problems unfortunately
Join a area120 team if you are at google
I thought big N was Netflix and was very surprised you could get bored there. Then it turns out to be G, that would make sense...
I feel you bro. Never understand why big companies jump through all the hoops to hire smart and driven folks, just to force them do meaningless jobs. Being in this situation myself. I worked in many areas of engineering - from HTML/JS frontends to core OS development(outside of Apple). Now doing backend development in one of the teams at Apple. To me, the most interesting and challenging chapters was working in the embedded OS space. Many features required deep understanding of new concepts and came with unique domain experience. But it also came with a significant amount of stress, which I hated. Looking at what me and my colleagues are doing in the distributed systems space, it bores me to death. It’s just passing some tokens or data from one service to another and all the boilerplate around that. Or migration from one deprecated system to another yet to be deprecated. The good side is that my WLB is better, but that's about it. I don't want to offend anyone who might like that type of work. Just wanted to find if I'm not alone and get an advice regarding teams/companies doing meaningful and interesting work and having good WLB.
Come to FB. Lots of challenging work to be done. You can work a lot and make a big impact and you’ll never feel bored. If you end up not liking that style then you can cut back on your work and chill out
Much harder to ‘cut back on your work and chill out’ than you seem to suggest. The culture and PSC cycles create an intense focus on the short term, throw away work. You’ll spend hours building shitty tech just to squeeze it in before PSC. If you want to cut back on your work and chill out, that’s what Google’s for.
Team and org dependent. Sounds like you’re on a less relaxed team. Sorry to hear that
Come to Amazon. You will be doing the boring works under a lot of pressure lol
Yeah that’s definitely the trade off (Perks & Pay Vs. Less red tape and productivity) Some are okay with being bored for the sake of great salaries that will allow them to retire 5, maybe 10 years earlier than those in startups. Also many of these folks are less risk averse, and like the safety security of a big company. Others (sounds like you) are more passion/mission driven and would take less pay and far fewer perks in order to do meaningful work. Now there’s obviously passionate people in bigger companies, and money driven people in startups, but this is just what I’ve noticed. Nothing wrong with going back to the startup, even for half the pay, if that’s what drives you! Go for it!
It's not even really about the passion for me. Im not even that into software engineering. I just hate being bored. I want to do something challenging and there's nothing challenging about my current job