I've been on both sides of the BigCo fence, and in my experience, the small companies I've worked at have been much more dysfunctional than the alternatives. A BigCo is usually a loose conglomerate of smaller fiefdoms; -much- the sanity level in your team depends on your immediate boss and coworkers. If you luck out and find the right bunch, you're set. A small company is usually a larger fiefdom than a BigCo team, and self-selects for certain bodily orifices, doormats and complexity junkies.
In the last year I left BigCo for the kind of company you describe. It's been mostly a positive experience so far. I've gone to a lot less meetings and learned a ton about technologies I never would have touched at my BigCo job.
At small companies, you ship. Or you go out of business.
This is important to keep in mind mainly because many people have a hard time with that sort of stress. Small companies, even profitable ones, have small margins of error. The upside is that in a small company you should have a lot more contribution to the success or failure.
Went from a 120,000 person company to a 12 person company and this is so true.
If you’ve got great leadership, a small company can be an incredibly fun, almost artistic like experience to work at. A
That being said I really enjoyed my time at Bigco. It teaches you a ton about bureaucracy, the inevitable issues large groups of humans has, there is a built in social network, lots of legal protections, etc.
My previous job was at a company that fluctuated between 15-25 people, not exactly a startup so you can call it "old smallco". My current job is at a company of 4-5 thousand with multiple offices in different countries. My experience is as follows
Pros of "smallco":
- Felt like a family business, friendly atmosphere, great relationship with everyone
- You get to do things outside your job spec and consequently acquire a broad range of skills
- Design freedom, your input is never dismissed/ignored
- "Vertical" knowledge of the product (design, manufacturing, testing), familiarity with every component even if completely unrelated to your skills
- Virtually no bureaucracy, very small time-to-fix (from identifying a problem to deploying the fix)
- Never boring
Cons:
- Job insecurity. The company can basically go under any day
- Salary is not amazing, raises are infrequent and small
- At some point you are basically the expert in your domain. This means there's none more experienced than you to teach you new things or give you some great insight
- No rigorous process, minimal documentation, you basically end up hacking together stuff as you go
Pros of bigger company:
- Higher job security, better salary, benefits and career opportunities
- Better process, your work is more organized
- Plenty of people around you that can help you learn and advance your skills
Cons:
- Little freedom to design, you need to stay in your "lane", improvisation is a no-no. This is not bad per se, it's just not as exciting
- Months go by and you still don't know 1/4 of the people on your floor. Relationships are more formal
- Bureaucracy is sometimes infuriating. Need another chair? send an e-mail to the correct department, wait a day or two. Need to use your favorite text editor instead of the company standard? You need approval from your manager.
Never worked in a behemoth like google, ms, intel,etc. but I expect the pros/cons to be even more accentuated.
Small companies tend to have stronger empathetic bonds between people. Larger companies are much more prone to treating people like cogs to be replaced when worn out. More than that, larger companies might be able to shuffle problematic employees around rather than having to outright fire them.
It's a double edged blade to be sure- I've heard horror stories of bad small businesses as well- but my experience at both leaves me with a very strong preference for working for small companies.
Bigco can mean being constantly surrounded by experts and having to compete with more experienced coworkers to get the fun projects or extra responsibility that make a job rewarding. It can also mean lots of easy learning from well experienced coworkers.
Smallco can mean less expert coworkers to learn from but lots of room to grow and lots of experience gained from extra responsibility.
The most insane people I've worked with were at small companies (under 100 employees). A lot of bullshit is tolerated from early employees and cofounders. Big company pathology seems much more straightforward. It's not easier to deal with, but it's mostly just a bunch of assholes climbing the corporate ladder and a lot of incompetency.
* To add to this, the crazy people were slowly pushed out after we were acquired by a slightly larger company.
In my experience bigger companies are more dysfunctional, but they appear less so the higher up in the company you are.
When you're just some low-level worker for a mega corp high-level decisions tend to get passed down with little to no context through several layers of management half of whom are disconnected from the issues you face on the ground, and the other half are disconnected from the decision making at the top.
This does cause some dysfunction, but I agree with you that it's not often not as bad as it seems when you have context of the why decisions are being made.
Not all companies do such a bad job at communication either and flatter organisation structures can help empower the people on the ground to make decisions which might otherwise need the approval of several layers of management. But still, in a large company there's inevitably always going to be some disconnect which will cause some level of dysfunction that you wouldn't get in a small company.
Yeah. BigCo bureaucracy and management is killing me. If you don't mind me asking, what smaller company did you go to, or what does smaller company do?
I'm a consultant that mainly works with big companies, the main thing big companies have in common is that they are big.
Seriously there's so much variation in how they go about things that it makes no sense to say big is bad and small is better. It all depends on the individual case. I've seen a lot of dysfunctional companies of all sizes.
oh i agree - that's why i left a streak of startup jobs to get paid more to do less at BigCo.
BigCo isn't fratty at all in my limited experience. Be professional, follow whatever 10 commandments the C-suite prints out & laminates for you, and sell yourself once a year in self-review and you'll win out and barely work if you're remote.
Smaller companies have very little org-chart structure - it's a single small tree. There's no equilibrium in the org chart. So a couple bad actors can easily ruin it all. And they did at every startup I was at.
My play is to collect checks and eventually make art with my computer science experience for the rest of my life.
I prefer smaller companies. Almost all of the smaller companies I've worked for either grew, or grew and got acquired and become big companies. Big companies are full of bureaucratic nonsense and friction. I would start looking for another small company. Doing that tends to reinvigorate me.
Only: Small ones are even worse (see other comments). With big ones you have at least "something": Colleagues and "a lot of money blowing in at the front". HR is not your friend. OP makes a lot of mistakes. Life is hard. Big companies are a good / reasonable choice: The money. With smaller companies there is less money and more problems, usually, EXCEPT they are directly dealing with big corps (e.g.), which puts you back into big-corp-exposure. You have to go where the money is.
Size of the company is irrelevant to me. I have found that I am happiest when I have but a single boss, and that person not only knows how to adapt people to the business and vice versa, but is also capable at least of accurately evaluating my work, even if he or she is unable to do what I do.
The worst places I have worked invariably involve a muddied chain of command, where the people with the authority to direct or redirect my work have no understanding of how or when they should do so. Often, those people are simultaneously in competition with you while you are expected to cooperate with them.
Small company size is not a guarantee of sane and rational management. Large size is not a guarantee that your bosses will be idiots. But a subunit of a larger company can fail for a much longer period of time before becoming unable to continue, so that may be what causes the perceived differential.
A dysfunctional small company fails fast. A dysfunctional unit of a large company could limp along for decades without changing. On the other side, a great small company could just never take off, and a great unit of a large company could be axed from the executive suite without any apparent reason.
In my experience, I have seen more power imbalance at small/medium sized businesses. Whereas larger companies you tend to get lost in the bureaucracy and have the ability to switch teams/orgs and get out of bad situations. HR is usually more helpful with this too.
YMMV.
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