I've never worked at a "big company", but I've worked at small ones, and one of those grew to be medium-sized.
One thing that I notice that's missing from the article is support.
At every small company, I was in charge of more than 1 aspect of the product, even if that wasn't my area of expertise. I've even been in charge of every aspect, as the sole employee that could handle them.
This is extremely exciting and fun, for a while. Eventually, it wears on you and you need someone else. As the company grew and we hired more and more, I eventually settled down into having 1 main thing I was responsible for, and even that could have been handled by someone else if needed. (For vacations, even.)
Because of that, I don't want to work at a small company again. Being able to go to a database-specialist and ask for help with performance was amazing. Even though I enjoyed all those hours of DB tuning and learning about it, I'd rather have been coding. (And of course, the DB guy would rather be doing DB-guy-stuff. They tried asking him to code, and that didn't go well. It wasn't what he was good at. To be fair, I was similarly inept at DB tuning at first, but when there was nobody else, you couldn't tell how bad I was. Heck, I couldn't tell, either.)
Anyhow, my point is that bigger companies have a network of employees to lean on for support, where smaller companies require more of people.
Comments
I've never worked at a "big company", but I've worked at small ones, and one of those grew to be medium-sized.
One thing that I notice that's missing from the article is support.
At every small company, I was in charge of more than 1 aspect of the product, even if that wasn't my area of expertise. I've even been in charge of every aspect, as the sole employee that could handle them.
This is extremely exciting and fun, for a while. Eventually, it wears on you and you need someone else. As the company grew and we hired more and more, I eventually settled down into having 1 main thing I was responsible for, and even that could have been handled by someone else if needed. (For vacations, even.)
Because of that, I don't want to work at a small company again. Being able to go to a database-specialist and ask for help with performance was amazing. Even though I enjoyed all those hours of DB tuning and learning about it, I'd rather have been coding. (And of course, the DB guy would rather be doing DB-guy-stuff. They tried asking him to code, and that didn't go well. It wasn't what he was good at. To be fair, I was similarly inept at DB tuning at first, but when there was nobody else, you couldn't tell how bad I was. Heck, I couldn't tell, either.)
Anyhow, my point is that bigger companies have a network of employees to lean on for support, where smaller companies require more of people.