Escape from the nest of success or the problems of large companies
Hi, Habr! They say sincere confession softens the punishment. I repent - most of the article will be a frank copy-paste of someone else's text. I ask moderators not to judge strictly and be considered a huge quote. Because it is better not to say. Because I, you, you, the reader - we all were there or can be. In large intergalactic corporations, companies that lure offices, all sorts of buns from the cornucopia, scooters in the corridors and other relax-capsules, but rarely say that it will be in return. And in return there will be endless meetings, Legacy, inertia and ... his mother, the lonely feeling like a little cog in some kind of hellish machine. I will begin with my story - in one paragraph. And then - just a blatant bomb - a text, every word of which was firmly answered in me, like a stern uncle.
A little bit about yourself. I am a developer with 15 years experience, a SQL Jedi and an expert in processing analytical data. I have been working with OLAP-systems, SAP, billing of several operators and other serious automated control systems. But now I'm not working in a huge company, in a small startup that makes a useful product for a business, and I feel good. Three years ago, I went here for a lower salary and lost a hammock and anlim M & M's. More precisely, no, not so. Three years ago, I was released. From a huge well-known company, where he worked from 9 to 18, sometimes up to 23, and a couple of times until 4:00. I was fascinated by the company's goals, the prestige of a pass on a belt, and in exchange for this, I delved into the Legacy code, tried not to blast at scram-meetings, endured formal meetings from the category “now the marketing specialists will hear nothing from the developers with a report on the new release”. Until I realized that I was rapidly losing my nerves, time, and ... qualifications on monotonous tasks. Familiar? Then you will understand why I brought this article to Habr. Enjoy your reading, shake your mustache.
6 months ago I put mybadge and a badge gun on the table and left Yandex. I worked there for quite a long time as a linear bulldozer in different divisions, so that in the end, on a number of topics, to get a firm understanding of “as [not] necessary . ” Both during work and after, I have often communicated with colleagues from other large companies. I also read a lot of insiders about how it works in the world giants. I have an opinion. Further, the combination of these companies will be called Guyandbuk .
')
I want to voice an opinion for two reasons. And - it itself climbs, nowhere to go. B - sometimes they ask whether it is worth going to work in Guyandbuk. I will combine both points in one text.
The first obligatory preface. I know that readers cannot read. I know that the text is often read in my own head, and not from the sheet. Therefore, I stress: grateful for the years of experience. I saw a lot of good, met with many good people who do their work well. In no case is this essay to be taken by spitting in the back of the “former”. This is stupid. It is no less foolish to ignore the characteristic features of top companies. What I will write.
The second mandatory foreword. There is no single Guyandbuk. It is always a set of hundreds of units, many of which are very different from each other. Vasya, who is in the window grille development group, will look at the orders in the plastic parquet finishing group with big eyes, even if they are on the same floor. Therefore, the text will most likely be read further by one with complete understanding, by others with complete incomprehension. From here, by the way, is another hint: you are not hired in Guyandbuk, you are hired in a specific unit to a specific leader for specific tasks. Sometimes this knowledge is lost upon admission, then natural disappointment occurs.
The third obligatory preface. For some time now it has become important for me to understand what I spend my life on. Not an abstract time. It is life. It is given once, there are not so many rational conscious parts in it (idiot until 20 years old, after 60 years I am afraid to make plans, only 40 years in total). How does work affect me? What development does she give me? Is becoming a more fit specialist or degrading? Therefore, the assessment of companies from this position. Of course, your assessment will be yours. And with my can never match. I knew for sure two fighters who described the norms below, since allowed to sit still, do something from a call to a call and not to steam . The soldier is sleeping, the service is on. I am now interested in the balance of the applied and received benefits without distortions.
I'll start with the soul-saving. If you are a junior and want to experience, you must go to Guyandbuk. Already in a year you can master as much as you don’t absorb in a garage in five years. Even if you sit on a chair in the middle of the openspace all day long, you will learn a lot from the conversations around you. And all sorts of social packages, cookies on coffee points, offices of some A-class ... well, the start is good, if you have a head on your shoulders. Any task seems interesting, because the year will fly like a whistle between milk teeth.
Further less soul-saving.
If you combine all the points below, you get an item that could be made zero in the list. Every working day you will face it. Every working day you will quietly (sometimes loudly) facepalm. Almost every task in Guyandbuk will be done longer than normal for an objective set of reasons (in the context of the company). But always longer. This is sad. So…
First, an abundance of hell meetings. At the same time, most of them are either stupid by their very nature, or are stupidly passing away. Not only do you meet about whether to hold a meeting that sums up a summary of meetings about meetings. You will be waiting late. Then you will wait out the obligatory jokes. Then it turns out that someone is not in the subject and he needs to explain on the fingers. Then it turns out that there is a topic that is more important, because we will discuss the current topic at the next meeting, and we will devote this meeting to another topic, but now the time is over, so let's meet separately about another topic. It is enough to spend four hourly meetings four times a week in such a way that four workers a day will be lost in a month (for a year, respectively, two full man-months in the void). And there are hundreds. A thousand hours.
The advantage is that you get a useful experience of hating meetings (one time) and understanding how to effectively conduct a meeting (two).
In a normal small office for about 20.30 minutes you discuss exactly what you need, exactly when you need to. Or on the way to lunch. Or in Slack in the chat for N people.
Secondly, hell abundance of Legacy. It’s possible to close the ball behind your back and get into the code that Vasya (admin) wrote, who quit before Petit (front-end), who didn’t rewrite the code, which now formally supports Kohl (backend), who don’t support sick of this nagging bullshit, which, nevertheless, in the dependencies of the five services, which are also legacy, because no one has time to drag a civilization from the last century into the present century, at least to its beginning. On Legacy, you will definitely stumble. It is impossible to update any package, because breaks down. It is impossible to integrate with another service, i.e. there is one tenth of the digger out of working hands, and part of the code must be rewritten. Then you just need to do something with the code useful, but it is presented in the form of this whole topper, to which there are a ton of questions, but not a single answer, except "for historical reasons . " Also not the most productive waste of time. It is especially interesting to read news about new versions of languages, technologies, software. Just read, because the modern air defense complex is not screwed to a rusty seiner.
A lot of advantages. You better understand the [multi-year] product life cycle (times), get a heap of run-in [not] working solutions (two) in your head, stuff your eyes and fingers on the romp with hundreds of thousands of lines of the most different someone else's code (three), again earn useful hatred for Legacy (four), learn to take into account many factors in any system change (five).
In a normal small office, you are updated fairly quickly. There are islands of Legacy, of course. But they are quite capable of either rewriting from scratch, or driving them with kicks into a bright future within a reasonable time. Updating risks are foreseeable, transition efforts too.
Thirdly, hell abundance of managers. At some point in time, in one of the fun of the permutations of places and amounts in the vertical of power from me to the Most Important, there were eight (nine? Forgot already) hopes. Taking into account the abundance of any leading red tape (from “to wrap Ivanov’s decree on the decree” to “to appear at twenty meetings a week” ) ... No, really, my heart is shedding blood when I estimate how many months people Guyandbuki spend on making decisions, pieces of paper, affirmations, synchronization, and other cranberries were walking along this spreading guideline. An unpleasant nuance is also in the fact that such a crowd of people with various kinds of power inevitably gives rise to politoty, diplomacy and other intrigue with which a normal engineer does not want to have a deal.
There are pluses. If you watch managers for a long time, learn to understand what is a good leader and what is bad (time). Observations also help to understand which holes in the processes, by whom, and why close (two).
In a normal small office, many managers simply have nowhere to go, because there are few of them and they are in business.
Fourth, the swamp of inertia. Guyandbuki lost the flexibility of their youth. Dottedly, it stands out for advanced and experimental units, but a massive one ... where a small business discussed the problem in the morning, made a decision during the day, and realized it in the evening, Guandbuk would spend months. With one agree. To other inform. Third convince. Fourth warn. The fifth passed by, but they want to argue. The sixth and seventh are dependent on change, therefore, to ensure migration, and they have their own plans. Eighths want to participate, but with their samovar. As a result, a prolonged circus, sinking in countless meetings and approvals.
Plus, all the same hatred, but to the marshes (times), well, the ability to persistently push their decisions through this jelly (two).
In a normal small office, you do not spend decades on dozens of people with their cockroaches simply because the office is small and see paragraph "sixth".
Fifth, a large but closed world of bicycles. Guandbuk fills his head so much that the connection with reality is lost. We have the coolest developers (not all), the most interesting tasks (not always), the most advanced solutions (not everywhere). Such elitism makes it difficult to objectively evaluate people, processes, results. Inside is a huge parking lot of bicycles (Alibaba is most pleased, patched everything from Linux to Java), the ability to ride on which you will flaunt in the future.
Plus just a dislike for bicycling. Enough N times to try to attach to the case stupid inner knee, not to want to ever again.
In a normal small office there is no desire to waste resources on cycling. It is too expensive both tactically and strategically.
Sixth, far from involvement. I will try to formulate more clearly. You are the seller in the fruit shop. And at the same time the owner. The more you work and the more you sell, the greater your contribution to the business and the greater the involvement. In this example, 100%. Another example. You are a seller in the fruit department in the network agro supermarket. Your contribution is still visible and clear, but it is small and you are far from the cause. The third example. You are a seller in the citrus department of the fruit direction of the network universal supermarket with a million employees. The network is a conglomeration of businesses from the extraction of river sand to the issuance of loans. Participation is bad. Going to zero. Here in Guyandbukh the same garbage happens if you do not get into those brilliant 5% of the key business employees (like Sebastian Trun on Google, for example). It seems to be constantly working. Hundreds, thousands of tickets recycled. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code. But at some point, such a linear workhorse has unpleasant thoughts. Who am I? What am I doing here? Why all this? At the very bottom of such reflections, one can hit about "I am nobody, who can be replaced at any moment by the same one . "
I will repeat in other words: speech about fighters like me. Not the key creator of computer vision, not a breakthrough uncle in machine learning, I do not move the industry of UAVs. Just a riveter and planer. So such fighters in large companies in any way. And getting out of this pit under the weight of everyday routine is very difficult, especially if there is life outside of work. Garbage also in the fact that around a lot of the same. The result is bad: there is no single conscious movement in the direction of the finishing ribbon. People are buried in processes, rolled from empty to empty, generally lose the purpose of the work. They just do something so that the trackers have tickets.
Plus a clearer understanding of the distance from the business / goals / values ​​of the employer at which you are comfortable.
In a normal small office, any sneeze affects everything; every employee is a value.
With all the above, Guyandbuki should not be considered strictly negative. There are excellent experts who should study. There are interesting solutions. There are resources that allow you to solve problems that are fundamentally inaccessible to small offices. If you are lucky to get into a suitable unit, get an excellent development school with all the pleasant and necessary fascism in the form of code review, CI, planning, a normal role-playing system (in which shkolota does not ask, but what for managers or testers). In general, until the fig all useful. But this does not happen as often as we would like.
He worked in Guyandbuk long enough to communicate (or just observe) with dozens (and even hundreds) of people who had left (quite intelligent specialists, and not broken out after the probationary period). Burnout and loss of meaning in such work. This is the main reason, along with money. Sooner or later, but comes to everyone who figs not on a relaxed. I managed to get tired of this and never want to ever again. Moreover, it is too sharp and obvious difference with the same points in the current work.
Perhaps not doing something. Perhaps not with those communicated. Perhaps it’s just not my format of work, in which hundreds of faces are held in front of my eyes with feet and speaking mouths. I know people who are happy in Guyandbuki. They are good and even beautiful. Eyes burn. Therefore ... perceive this essay through the lens of your own experience, and, generally, critically. In your world, everything can be completely wrong.
Amen.
A little bit about yourself. I am a developer with 15 years experience, a SQL Jedi and an expert in processing analytical data. I have been working with OLAP-systems, SAP, billing of several operators and other serious automated control systems. But now I'm not working in a huge company, in a small startup that makes a useful product for a business, and I feel good. Three years ago, I went here for a lower salary and lost a hammock and anlim M & M's. More precisely, no, not so. Three years ago, I was released. From a huge well-known company, where he worked from 9 to 18, sometimes up to 23, and a couple of times until 4:00. I was fascinated by the company's goals, the prestige of a pass on a belt, and in exchange for this, I delved into the Legacy code, tried not to blast at scram-meetings, endured formal meetings from the category “now the marketing specialists will hear nothing from the developers with a report on the new release”. Until I realized that I was rapidly losing my nerves, time, and ... qualifications on monotonous tasks. Familiar? Then you will understand why I brought this article to Habr. Enjoy your reading, shake your mustache.
6 months ago I put my
')
I want to voice an opinion for two reasons. And - it itself climbs, nowhere to go. B - sometimes they ask whether it is worth going to work in Guyandbuk. I will combine both points in one text.
The first obligatory preface. I know that readers cannot read. I know that the text is often read in my own head, and not from the sheet. Therefore, I stress: grateful for the years of experience. I saw a lot of good, met with many good people who do their work well. In no case is this essay to be taken by spitting in the back of the “former”. This is stupid. It is no less foolish to ignore the characteristic features of top companies. What I will write.
The second mandatory foreword. There is no single Guyandbuk. It is always a set of hundreds of units, many of which are very different from each other. Vasya, who is in the window grille development group, will look at the orders in the plastic parquet finishing group with big eyes, even if they are on the same floor. Therefore, the text will most likely be read further by one with complete understanding, by others with complete incomprehension. From here, by the way, is another hint: you are not hired in Guyandbuk, you are hired in a specific unit to a specific leader for specific tasks. Sometimes this knowledge is lost upon admission, then natural disappointment occurs.
The third obligatory preface. For some time now it has become important for me to understand what I spend my life on. Not an abstract time. It is life. It is given once, there are not so many rational conscious parts in it (idiot until 20 years old, after 60 years I am afraid to make plans, only 40 years in total). How does work affect me? What development does she give me? Is becoming a more fit specialist or degrading? Therefore, the assessment of companies from this position. Of course, your assessment will be yours. And with my can never match. I knew for sure two fighters who described the norms below, since allowed to sit still, do something from a call to a call and not to steam . The soldier is sleeping, the service is on. I am now interested in the balance of the applied and received benefits without distortions.
I'll start with the soul-saving. If you are a junior and want to experience, you must go to Guyandbuk. Already in a year you can master as much as you don’t absorb in a garage in five years. Even if you sit on a chair in the middle of the openspace all day long, you will learn a lot from the conversations around you. And all sorts of social packages, cookies on coffee points, offices of some A-class ... well, the start is good, if you have a head on your shoulders. Any task seems interesting, because the year will fly like a whistle between milk teeth.
Further less soul-saving.
If you combine all the points below, you get an item that could be made zero in the list. Every working day you will face it. Every working day you will quietly (sometimes loudly) facepalm. Almost every task in Guyandbuk will be done longer than normal for an objective set of reasons (in the context of the company). But always longer. This is sad. So…
First, an abundance of hell meetings. At the same time, most of them are either stupid by their very nature, or are stupidly passing away. Not only do you meet about whether to hold a meeting that sums up a summary of meetings about meetings. You will be waiting late. Then you will wait out the obligatory jokes. Then it turns out that someone is not in the subject and he needs to explain on the fingers. Then it turns out that there is a topic that is more important, because we will discuss the current topic at the next meeting, and we will devote this meeting to another topic, but now the time is over, so let's meet separately about another topic. It is enough to spend four hourly meetings four times a week in such a way that four workers a day will be lost in a month (for a year, respectively, two full man-months in the void). And there are hundreds. A thousand hours.
The advantage is that you get a useful experience of hating meetings (one time) and understanding how to effectively conduct a meeting (two).
In a normal small office for about 20.30 minutes you discuss exactly what you need, exactly when you need to. Or on the way to lunch. Or in Slack in the chat for N people.
Secondly, hell abundance of Legacy. It’s possible to close the ball behind your back and get into the code that Vasya (admin) wrote, who quit before Petit (front-end), who didn’t rewrite the code, which now formally supports Kohl (backend), who don’t support sick of this nagging bullshit, which, nevertheless, in the dependencies of the five services, which are also legacy, because no one has time to drag a civilization from the last century into the present century, at least to its beginning. On Legacy, you will definitely stumble. It is impossible to update any package, because breaks down. It is impossible to integrate with another service, i.e. there is one tenth of the digger out of working hands, and part of the code must be rewritten. Then you just need to do something with the code useful, but it is presented in the form of this whole topper, to which there are a ton of questions, but not a single answer, except "for historical reasons . " Also not the most productive waste of time. It is especially interesting to read news about new versions of languages, technologies, software. Just read, because the modern air defense complex is not screwed to a rusty seiner.
A lot of advantages. You better understand the [multi-year] product life cycle (times), get a heap of run-in [not] working solutions (two) in your head, stuff your eyes and fingers on the romp with hundreds of thousands of lines of the most different someone else's code (three), again earn useful hatred for Legacy (four), learn to take into account many factors in any system change (five).
In a normal small office, you are updated fairly quickly. There are islands of Legacy, of course. But they are quite capable of either rewriting from scratch, or driving them with kicks into a bright future within a reasonable time. Updating risks are foreseeable, transition efforts too.
Thirdly, hell abundance of managers. At some point in time, in one of the fun of the permutations of places and amounts in the vertical of power from me to the Most Important, there were eight (nine? Forgot already) hopes. Taking into account the abundance of any leading red tape (from “to wrap Ivanov’s decree on the decree” to “to appear at twenty meetings a week” ) ... No, really, my heart is shedding blood when I estimate how many months people Guyandbuki spend on making decisions, pieces of paper, affirmations, synchronization, and other cranberries were walking along this spreading guideline. An unpleasant nuance is also in the fact that such a crowd of people with various kinds of power inevitably gives rise to politoty, diplomacy and other intrigue with which a normal engineer does not want to have a deal.
There are pluses. If you watch managers for a long time, learn to understand what is a good leader and what is bad (time). Observations also help to understand which holes in the processes, by whom, and why close (two).
In a normal small office, many managers simply have nowhere to go, because there are few of them and they are in business.
Fourth, the swamp of inertia. Guyandbuki lost the flexibility of their youth. Dottedly, it stands out for advanced and experimental units, but a massive one ... where a small business discussed the problem in the morning, made a decision during the day, and realized it in the evening, Guandbuk would spend months. With one agree. To other inform. Third convince. Fourth warn. The fifth passed by, but they want to argue. The sixth and seventh are dependent on change, therefore, to ensure migration, and they have their own plans. Eighths want to participate, but with their samovar. As a result, a prolonged circus, sinking in countless meetings and approvals.
Plus, all the same hatred, but to the marshes (times), well, the ability to persistently push their decisions through this jelly (two).
In a normal small office, you do not spend decades on dozens of people with their cockroaches simply because the office is small and see paragraph "sixth".
Fifth, a large but closed world of bicycles. Guandbuk fills his head so much that the connection with reality is lost. We have the coolest developers (not all), the most interesting tasks (not always), the most advanced solutions (not everywhere). Such elitism makes it difficult to objectively evaluate people, processes, results. Inside is a huge parking lot of bicycles (Alibaba is most pleased, patched everything from Linux to Java), the ability to ride on which you will flaunt in the future.
Plus just a dislike for bicycling. Enough N times to try to attach to the case stupid inner knee, not to want to ever again.
In a normal small office there is no desire to waste resources on cycling. It is too expensive both tactically and strategically.
Sixth, far from involvement. I will try to formulate more clearly. You are the seller in the fruit shop. And at the same time the owner. The more you work and the more you sell, the greater your contribution to the business and the greater the involvement. In this example, 100%. Another example. You are a seller in the fruit department in the network agro supermarket. Your contribution is still visible and clear, but it is small and you are far from the cause. The third example. You are a seller in the citrus department of the fruit direction of the network universal supermarket with a million employees. The network is a conglomeration of businesses from the extraction of river sand to the issuance of loans. Participation is bad. Going to zero. Here in Guyandbukh the same garbage happens if you do not get into those brilliant 5% of the key business employees (like Sebastian Trun on Google, for example). It seems to be constantly working. Hundreds, thousands of tickets recycled. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code. But at some point, such a linear workhorse has unpleasant thoughts. Who am I? What am I doing here? Why all this? At the very bottom of such reflections, one can hit about "I am nobody, who can be replaced at any moment by the same one . "
I will repeat in other words: speech about fighters like me. Not the key creator of computer vision, not a breakthrough uncle in machine learning, I do not move the industry of UAVs. Just a riveter and planer. So such fighters in large companies in any way. And getting out of this pit under the weight of everyday routine is very difficult, especially if there is life outside of work. Garbage also in the fact that around a lot of the same. The result is bad: there is no single conscious movement in the direction of the finishing ribbon. People are buried in processes, rolled from empty to empty, generally lose the purpose of the work. They just do something so that the trackers have tickets.
Plus a clearer understanding of the distance from the business / goals / values ​​of the employer at which you are comfortable.
In a normal small office, any sneeze affects everything; every employee is a value.
With all the above, Guyandbuki should not be considered strictly negative. There are excellent experts who should study. There are interesting solutions. There are resources that allow you to solve problems that are fundamentally inaccessible to small offices. If you are lucky to get into a suitable unit, get an excellent development school with all the pleasant and necessary fascism in the form of code review, CI, planning, a normal role-playing system (in which shkolota does not ask, but what for managers or testers). In general, until the fig all useful. But this does not happen as often as we would like.
He worked in Guyandbuk long enough to communicate (or just observe) with dozens (and even hundreds) of people who had left (quite intelligent specialists, and not broken out after the probationary period). Burnout and loss of meaning in such work. This is the main reason, along with money. Sooner or later, but comes to everyone who figs not on a relaxed. I managed to get tired of this and never want to ever again. Moreover, it is too sharp and obvious difference with the same points in the current work.
Perhaps not doing something. Perhaps not with those communicated. Perhaps it’s just not my format of work, in which hundreds of faces are held in front of my eyes with feet and speaking mouths. I know people who are happy in Guyandbuki. They are good and even beautiful. Eyes burn. Therefore ... perceive this essay through the lens of your own experience, and, generally, critically. In your world, everything can be completely wrong.
Amen.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/342012/
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