There is no incentive to care for a company - so you probably shouldn't
Within a large company, structural problems almost never get addressed, and instead they grow into something far too problematic, at which point the company adds even more complexity to "deal" with the problem, which then creates even more problems in the future. Why does this happen?
My explanation as to why problems don't fundamentally get fixed is because you would need people obedient enough to work in the company in the first place, but also with enough integrity and ability to think for themselves to challenge the status quo and make the higher ups uncomfortable. I'm going to refer to such people as insane employees, referring to this excellent related essay on how people can read their manager’s mind.
There is a useful model for the 3 main types of people you find within a company: losers, clueless and sociopaths.
Insane employees somewhat fall in the category of the clueless, though they are clearly not dumb, as they can see many systemic issues that create all the problems within the company. But unlike a deliberate loser who decides to do the bare minimum, or someone who straight up decides to leave, the insane employee does the unsound decision - from the point of view of personal incentive - of doing the hard work anyway, which consists of things such as:
From the point of view of the company all of these actions are incredibly important, since for instance code bases tend to bloat out over time, since people are always afraid of removing old feature or implementations, making it less and less enjoyable to work it, less and less reliable, etc. But from the point of view of the individual, this endeavor is not rewarded at all, worse, it is often punished since it requires many meetings to explain to the higher ups why things should be another way, which is sure to pull a lot of negative attention. Such an employee would save themselves a lot of work by being someone mediocre who simply accepts the mediocre status quo. And if they were skilled, smart and ambitious, they should probably just quit the company as soon as possible.
Adding complexity rather than solving problems at their root is the norm because of a certain structure of incentives. The new features and tools and process brought by the added complexity will be visible, which means that others will celebrate it. But work of a more invisible nature, such as refactors and even proactive work, i.e. work that reduces the amount of future work, will go unnoticed, which means it won’t be rewarded, which means it won’t get done and the momentum of conformity will be that much stronger.
We can thus see that insane employees are in a rare intersection of people: competent and smart enough to make a difference, yet also working on things which aren't rewarded at all. Unsurprisingly, all of this eventually leads to burnouts or them quitting far later than they should have.
Every large company is essentially rotten in that way: incentivizing the wrong things which leads to systemic problems growing bigger and bigger, and the complexity rising and rising to deal with it. This is how you end up with:
I'm writing this because understanding the structure of large companies and the type of problems they address - again, mostly internal - is incredibly important for one's time, energy and sanity. I would say that an intelligent person has basically only 2 options in that environment: either leave that company right now for greener pastures, or do the bare minimum and use your time, energy and money for specific personal projects, in which case you will also leave in a few years. Notice the commonality?
Quite frankly, nothing good comes from working in a large company. 1 It’s almost impossible for someone who is honest with themselves to find fulfillment there - the whole thing is just too bureaucratic and misaligned with human values - and the company won't change even if you're smart and correct, since inner political games provide too much resistance to change. So you might as well use your resources for something you actually believe in.
As you can tell, I'm a deliberate loser within my company, so take that advice however you want. I have only worked for a year and a half, but I've already seen quite a bit of people pour in so much time and care in companies that reward them with absolutely nothing, just a dark and bottomless pit for a paycheck. Not much different from an abusive relationship, and just like those, the people involved always have some type of justification for staying, or some type of hope that it will get better. It never gets better.
I do believe work can be a fulfilling thing in one's life, but I don’t believe it is found in working for someone else. So my philosophy is to just use them as a way to get money for a few years, and then break out from that structure entirely. There is no winning move in a losing game, so the only path is looking for better games to play.
1 Not that smaller ones are better, but I’ve never worked in those so I wouldn’t be able to speak from experience.
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2024-03-15