Is Working at a Large or Small Company Better for Your Career? - RRU 270

Series B or serious funding. So it's very small. There's about seven people in it, and it's a productivity startup called Centered App, and we do kind of a flow type system so to get you into the flow productivity.

hundred people when I was working there. Then I went to work for Progress, which is a fairly large company as well, and then currently I work with Paige at Blues Wireless and we are a startup of twenty some people. So I've got experience from sort of both large and small and somewhere in between.

fourth or twenty fifth employee just joined recently. But prior to that, for about five years, I worked in various marketing agencies, and I worked for medium sized ones of

a few hundred people. One was acquired and became part of a giant publicist marketing group, and then I went to a startup of about forty forty people when I was there, So everything from very large to very small and back again, and all of them have definite benefits and definite drawbacks, And it just depends, I guess what you're looking for or what you place more value on as to which ones you might be happier with, and of course what stage of your career you're in too.

If you're just starting out, maybe a startup where you get to touch everything is really exciting to you, or it's terrifying because you don't know what you're doing and what other developers and people to kind of mentor and help guide you. So that's a kind of probably a good place to get started, is what benefits are there or what pros and cons to the various sizes and stages of companies.

Whereas the seed stage startup, you know, you don't really have an idea kind of almost day to day sometimes what you're going to be working on or what the intensity level is going to be, so there can be a lot more challenging in terms of that.

more structured that way. But at the same time, you could also view that as a negative because sometimes all that process can get in your way when you're trying

to do something. I know all of us could tell stories of like absurd things that happen at large companies that stop you from accomplishing very trivial things, whereas in small companies chances are at least there are always degrees of this, but siances are you have a little bit more freedom to do what you think is best accomplished, what you think needs to get accomplished, with less getting

in your way. But again just to the constant thing of trade offs, because that does make you more responsible for things. There's less of a crutch for you to fall back on if you can't get something done. You might have to do something that you don't want to do, but there's no one else to do it at a small company, so there's it's tricky.

much to learn that I just didn't know. It was how much more there was after this kind of initial

crash course that I had gotten. So being able to go to a company the size of home Depot, for instance, was fantastic because suddenly I was on a team of eight plus other developers from staff level all the way down to software engineering level, and everything in between, people who'd done it for decades, people who'd done it for a few years, people who had computer science degrees, people who didn't, and having all of that around me to learn from, and being part of a team where we

were responsible from everything full stack, our back end services, our front end services, our build pipeline, doing testing, doing code quality scans, setting up our GitHub repos and maintaining those and making sure that they were up to standards. All of that stuff was fantastic because I got to touch and learn about all these different things. But it was also very structured, like you say in that this was our project, this was our lane, this was what

we were responsible for. And then if you needed something done anywhere else, you had to talk to another team, or you had to submit a form, or you had to fill out X, Y and Z pieces of red tape to get it done. And sometimes it was great because we could just something would come to us and we could say we're not responsible for that, go talk

to this other team. Or stuff would come to us and we would be either responsible for it or we'd have to figure it out, or it would be very painful, like you say, to get it done what should have been trivial if somebody had had the level of clearance that was required to make what seemed like a small change.

So a lot of benefits to it, especially early in your career, because you can just go tap someone on the shoulder and say, hey, can you look at this code with me or help me figure out what this is doing or how to do it. But at the same time, a lot of processes and potentially a lot of time in between things getting done shouldn't really take that long if you knew if you were a smaller company, I.

and get more involved. And it was more of a gradual on ramping that I definitely appreciated at the time. And I only have good things to say about going through that process and that company because it did help me get up and running and you know, get my career jump started.

was never going to happen. They decided at a much higher level than my team, or my manager or even my department, what technologies we were using, what vendors we had access to for anything, and good luck getting something from the grassroots started that you heard about that you thought would be really useful to the team. That was just that was going to die on the vine. But

in startups that is absolutely the case. It's like, if you see something and you have an idea of a way to make it better, you can just throw it out there and probably start running with it that same day if you have the time and the energy to do so, which is awesome. It feels so good and knock stuff out that quickly, and it's a great way to look.

we should have it. It has good developer tools, This could really benefit us and the executives, Like like I had to schedule meetings with executives to try to get this to happen because they were saying, well, our apps don't support Chrome, why do you need this? And like just the absurdity of that entire process, right, Like, especially given the benefit of hindsight and looking back at this

is just it gets frustrating at a certain point. Like if if you're the type of person that wants total control over what you're doing and want to be able to try and experiment with things, that those sorts of experiences, I mean, things like that are eventually why I left that company is because that's it just gets ridiculous. Right, At a certain point, you just can't take that sort of thing anymore.

I want them to go wrong in? Is it is it overworking myself or is it just kind of being frustrated to the point where I'm just like, ah, peace out, I don't need this stuff anymore.

bit more work. But you know, unless unless you're really that sort of person that wants to throw yourself headfirst into this stuff, like I would definitely consider it a red flag if they told me, you know, you're expected to work fifty sixty hours a week or to do the weekend work, And so that's the sort of thing

I would look for. And on the flip side, like with big companies, I mean, you would want to ask questions about how much authority do developers have, how much are they involved in the decision making processes, you know, how much do they get to say, and what technologies

are used because I've been involved. Even though those are like stereotypical things about these companies, there's certainly pockets of big companies that operate more like a startup, right and there are startups that are a little bit more stable and secure. So those are the sort of things I guess to look for as you're exploring your options.

the front ends, and you're going to be doing some probably some pretty complex stuff with it. But if you are if you like having a variety of things to work on, then maybe a startup is a better choice for that because you'll probably be touching one website one day, and then you'll be looking at some kind of an SEO tool the next day, and then you'll be trying to get analytics a third day and figuring out how to connect all these different pieces of the company into

things that make sense. So if you get a little burned out on one piece, you could probably go pick up a bug somewhere else and get kind of a refresher and a little respite from it, and then you go back to it in a few days time. So

it's kind of like breadth versus depth. And there's small companies startups still are doing very complex things as well, but there's still going to be probably a better chance of you getting more experience in more different things than there would be on a larger product team in a big organization.

cored engineering, like a heart in engineering. And then you've got your sort of brick and mortar startups like your home depot, your Walmart, your Nike, where they're companies that culturally are really about like having a star and you're like the weird tech folks coming in saying, well, way we can sell this stuff online?

store employees do on a daily basis. And once I was hired, they had actually made that they had gotten rid of that as a requirement, So you did your one store day when you first started, and then pretty much never again because they wanted you working on whatever

it was that you were actually hired to do. But I you know, I really enjoyed it, and I think a lot of people gained a lot more empathy for the amount of stuff that customer service or customer facing people put up with on a daily basis, and especially when it's something like home depot hardware, where people come in and something is broken off of their window but

they have no idea what it's called. You have no idea what it's called, You've never even seen this piece before, and you're expected to try and help them find it in the store and replace it. So it was a I think it's a great wake up call for people who have not worked in customers facing jobs before just how difficult that can be and how tiring it can be.

But at the same time, I also very much understand we're paying you a lot more, most likely than we're paying the store employees, So do your job, whatever it was we actually hired.

bit more like a cog and a giant system. And I have to imagine that home depot program was trying to help you rectify that or bring people close to it to it, because when I worked in commercial automobile insurance, like I never met anybody that was actually insurance agent or an actual policy holder, so it was very I was very far removed. It felt very just esoteric random stuff I was doing. And it does give you, like

a little bus motivation. It does help when you really feel like you are doing something important or worthwhile or have a connection to whatever it is the end product or service that it is you're producing.

talk to somebody and you want to get you know, get some advice. You know, here's an algorithm saying, hey, you know you bought you know, these kind of motion petrol shoes whatever. And then I felt like, oh, I had an impact in somebody's life today, and that's a good thing. That's a nice way to wake up in the morning and feel like, ah, you know, I'm changing in the world this.

would get feedback both negative and positive. But some of the times when we'd get positive feedback, people would say things like we'd saved them hours out of their week with stuff that we had made and done, which was so rewarding. And that's the kind of thing exactly that

really motivates you. It's like you might not see as you're building something the benefit or the impact that it's going to have on somebody else's job, But hearing things like we'd saved them hours of work a week was awesome. And that's something that kind of was attractive to me when I was starting to interview at Blues where I work now. Was seeing the product that they're making and hearing how it could improve so much was really enticing.

You know, it's a product that makes it easy to have an Internet of Things object that doesn't necessarily have access to Wi Fi. It gives it that cellular connection so that it can take the data from the sensors that it's got and send it up to a cloud really easily. And when you start to think about all the potential use cases for that and how many people or how many products it could positively impact, that's really really cool to think about all the things that it

could help make better and make easier. And that's something that I wanted to be part of.

using it. So I used to like going to events like JavaScript events, software events, because sometimes people would come up to we'd have like booze or just see them and people would say, Hey, I use your stuff, or I've read your blog post, and it's it's an amazing like just jolt you get because lots of times when you do stuff like that, you put work out into the ether and unless somebody tells you, you just kind of assumed well, it's out there, and who knows if

anybody's going to see this or do anything with it. So just getting that, like that reassurance that your work actually is being used, you have a purpose in life at least for this.

incentive that's going a different way. And to get there, right, you got to build an aim for yourself, and that is in some senses a risk at a big company, because big companies are gonna have you know, closed source systems, and unless you're going to get on an open source project that is well well supported inside of a big company, lots of big companies start oss and then just let it die in the search for you know, profit, which is of course important, but you know, that kind of

thing you want, you're going to be able to build up some blog posts and content around your resume. I think maybe a little bit more at the tech company or at the like smaller medium sized company that's kind of doing some innovative work and wants to put something out in open source, maybe get a little buzz better for recruiting. And I think there's many more opportunities for well, sorry, but like selfless self promotion at like in some of

these companies. And that's the thing to keep you an eye out for, because you do have to promote yourself.

And even though I worked on an internal tool, I found plenty of opportunities to take what I had learned and change it into something that I didn't use our internal source code for, you know, I could make a much smaller example that I would put into my own GitHub repo and then put out in the community that was free of all the home depot specific ip or I would just take a concept that I had learned about and create some small, much simplified version of it,

or even even stuff that I had built inside projects was a great one that I would be able to use because they were it was my own code, and I would, you know, I would refer back to stuff that we had done at work to figure out how to make it work for my side project. But it

was all written by me and my own stuff. But that was a huge, huge thing, I think in helping me get further in my career because it was something that I could point to internally when somebody would have a question, I'd be like, oh, I wrote a blog post about that, and so you know, people on my team could benefit from it. My managers could see that I was doing it. It helped kind of solidify yes, I do know what I'm talking about, and I have at least learned enough to be able to write and

teach somebody else about it. But it also was an outside signal to people outside of the company. That I was doing good things and giving back to the community in this way and making my way.

sister podcast of ours, talking about it. And then I was invited to React Roundup because I'd done a conference talk on responsive design and React and that had been

picked up by one of the newsletter publications. So that kind of stuff not only does it build your credibility and give you a platform which a lot of other developers are not doing, so it's a huge visibility booster there, but it also can potentially lead to paid speaking engagements, paid writing engagements, new jobs because somebody saw that you did X, Y and Z and they're like, I need somebody here to do X, Y and Z. Also, it's ridiculous how if you're consistently doing stuff like that, you

can turn it into something much bigger than what it started out as.

And I feel like in a startup, there's because there's less bureaucracy, you have more ability to get your name out for sure, because you have more freedom to work on stuff you're interested in and therefore more willing to write about. Small companies in general aren't going to care, like, you know, lose my care if you take like an entire section of code you've been working on for a

long time and throw it out there. But if you're just referencing something you did, it's like, oh, that's like good pr Probably like putting the name out there, it's it's not a big deal. There's there's less concerns, So I feel like you definitely do have more freedom at a smaller company to try to make a name for yourself than you do instead of like a giant organization.

I ran into this little thing. I'm going to go and you know, do a quick dev too on how to fix this one particular issue, and you'll end up in a bunch of Google searches because other people will get stuck on and be like, oh, yeah, you know that guy's you know, I've got a good, you know, recipe for how to get around that, and then it kind of builds on it and you get more and more exposure and that's great.

It's the most basic thing ever of stuff that I have figured out how to do, either through work, through projects, and when I come across something else that I think would be interesting or that I think other people would like to see how I did it, I'll just write it down as a note to myself, and then when I'm when I have time and when I'm looking for something to write about, I'll just reference back to that and pick one of the topics that still sounds good.

And it's a great jumping off point because I know a lot of people struggle with, well what am I going to write about? Well, what are you doing all day? You're probably solving interesting problems. So just kind of try and keep a reminder to yourself of something interesting that you solved. You know, probably somebody else, you know, they'll run up against it too. You're probably not the only person who will meet this particular thing.

and Uber. You can have interesting problems to solve in all sorts of markets, Like there were certainly interesting insurance problems.

I'm sure there are interesting home depot problems, Nike problems as well, because those types of companies have like there's something to be said about solving something at those sorts of scales as well, like you really do have the potential to touch a lot of people to make a difference, Like it's it is funny because bigger companies also tend to have more ceremony and process, but that's somewhat for a reason, Like sometimes you get to deal with some

interesting problems of hitting sometimes huge user bases and large data sets that you're going to have trouble finding at a startup, So sometimes you can find some unique and interesting problems to solve at big companies.

It was more how do we make this work? Because it needs to work. It was just so, yeah, those are ridiculous problems. But because it was a larger company and has been around for forty years, you couldn't just say we're not going to support this anymore because the users would mutiny and come with us, come at us with pitchfork. So yeah, there were definitely lots of weird,

interesting problems that had to be solved. But at the same time, these are the same kind of problems that I know other companies of large scale and maybe older are also struggling with. Not everybody can start out as Google and just be all information systems data from the get go. There's lots and lots of brick and mortar stores that are struggling with legacy systems and old processes

that they can't just shut down. They have to revamp them and make them bring them into the twenty first century,

but also support the older way of doing stuff. Well, one thing that I wanted to bring up that I don't think we've really talked about is the various sorts of roles that you can have at different companies like a large store or a large company like home depot because of what they do, they're not going to have things like developer relations that they just don't need it because they're selling hammers and they're selling chainsaws and they're

selling mails. But if you want to be maybe a site reliability engineer, they definitely have a team that is all about that, making sure that the infrastructure underneath all these applications is stable and sound and scaling and doing everything that it needs to where like Blues, developer relations is a huge part of our culture because we want developers to really like using our products and to think of us when they're looking at their next IoT initiative

and evaluating the options that are out there. So it also really depends like where where do you want your career to go. Do you want to specialize in a large company where you can be a real subject matter expert in a particular area or field, or do you want to be out in front of the public because that might make it more sense to be at a smaller company trying to get help get the company's name out at the same time as you're making a name

for yourself at that company. So it's there's a lot of different things to consider based on where you want to go next.

their entire job was specializing in one database. They were just the database person for that technology. They knew it in and out, and that database was important enough to the company to hire someone specifically for that. So if that's your thing, like, if you have a niche that you love, that's your life's passion, you probably can find a role for it at a larger company, or at least you're probably more likely to.

only had to work a minuscule amount of time. So if you want to be if you want to go into one of those archaic languages that are still powering so much of our industry, it's probably not a bad idea. But if you like being on the newer side of the technology, which will give you a lot more job options, probably, I mean, he had job security forever because this system

needed to exist and needed to be maintained. But you probably want to have a more flexible, more up to date skill set if you plan on being in this industry for another twenty thirty years. But yeah, there's definitely a place for those people, for sure.

train yourself and keep up with the new technologies. It's there's just more to it than that, and it's we get paid a lot of money, And there's a good reason that we get paid a lot of money, and it's because not necessarily just overworking, but like you have to make sure that you are also driving your own technology in your own career, and that's going to push beyond an a defined boundary.

but it's just what you're comfortable doing. So it's it's about finding what you want to accomplish and then you know, valuating your options and trying to figure out how to get there. And definitely say that those jobs exist in the larger company, Yeah, companies that almost expected that you have. You're you're passionate about technology and always learning and that sort of stuff. I remember when I was working a name which is a host of the social network company

and Steve jobs is still around. I mean, the entire company would shut down for watching that keynote because we're all just glued about what was going to come out of WILLI Wan because chocolate factory, you know, this year, and and you go into bigger companies and they're like, well, you know, it's Apple release day.

And I've really enjoyed using it. I remembered it because I got a new Mac for the new job and I went to take colon in something and my emoji picker didn't come up, and I was like, oh man, I didn't realize how reliant I had become on this thing. But it's also smart enough to you can filter out certain apps, so like Slack is essentially blacklisted because Slack already has an emoji picker, right, so it doesn't like you don't get two emoji pickers conflicting with each other,

and you can sort of configure that. But for lots of times, if you're just like in a random textbox and Chrome, sometimes it's nice to be able to type an emoji and just have it work. So I found it's a pretty nice littleb for doing that. So that's my pick.

into programming, and it's fantastic. It is two hundred and fifty two color pages with pictures and code blocks and all kinds of good tips for people who don't know anything about raspberry pies, but are looking to learn, and even though it is aimed at kids, I found it really useful and helpful. And apparently the rest of Twitter agreed with me, because there were plenty of people who were writing about how they had used it, how they

and their kids have used it. How no shame in buying a book that's aimed at kids to get you started. So I would highly recommend it if you are looking to get into that kind of industry or start tinkering around with this, because it's very helpful. It's cleared up a lot of stuff that I just didn't know. I didn't know about raspberry pies and how to kind of begin the IoT learning. So it's it's a good read.

that head first series and it is very good. If they had a head first mL, I'd be all over that right now for sure.

some people's minds. I think the pandemic and being inside all the time has really kind of brought to the fore all these issues of like burnout and the rest of it and how do we manage that? So very interesting.

It's great to be able to talk to other people on network, and so what we talked about before about self promotion, you know, find these kinds of ways that you can get your name out there and say, you know, hey, I'm in the community looking around for work, or this is what I've been doing lately, and get your name out there.