You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss (2008)
So I&#x27;m a manager in a large engineering org (~600 devs) and I&#x27;ve managed from 2 (and was therefore an IC) to ~40 people.  I can definitely relate to this blog post and if the author&#x27;s intent is to say that working in small groups is easier and more natural than working in large ones, then I agree wholeheartedly, but I think there are a few other things to keep in mind.<p>&gt; One is that companies will inevitably slow down as they grow larger, no matter how hard they try to keep their startup mojo.<p>He goes on to say that this is a consequence of the tree structure, which may be technically correct, but I think this is actually a consequence of the natural conservatism that develops at a large company making lots of money and paying lots of salaries.  This doesn&#x27;t change the validity of his message, but I think it&#x27;s worth pointing out the motivations of a large company.<p>&gt; The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things.<p>So this is also, on it&#x27;s face, completely valid.  The only exception I take with it is that &quot;new things&quot; is ill-defined.  If he means to say, &quot;building entirely new systems  from scratch is nearly impossible at a large company,&quot; then yes.  That is 100% true.  If in that he includes, &quot;building critical new functionality into an existing system that will make hundreds, thousands or maybe millions of users insanely happy,&quot; then, as you can probably read from my phrasing, I think he&#x27;s wrong.<p>I personally prefer doing the second than the first.  I think it&#x27;s a harder challenge to work within legacy systems and make them adapt than to be a full-time greenfield engineer.  (sidebar: If any of my colleagues are reading this they may be rolling their eyes given a project we have in motion at the moment because it&#x27;s perceived as greenfield--come see me I&#x27;ll do my best to convince you it&#x27;s not :D)<p>&gt; But a programmer deciding between a regular job at a big company and their own startup is probably going to learn more doing the startup.<p>Implicit in my previous comment is that, because it&#x27;s harder making things move in Big Corp one tends to learn more, both as an engineer and as a human.  Finding the right technical path through a heavily used, critical system is an interesting challenge, 
and evolving legacy systems, or spawning new work in a large org requires lots of communication, as well.<p>All that said, I do fully agree that working in such a large corp generates a different sort of stress than working in a small company (I&#x27;ve worked in many).  In a small company you&#x27;re worried, fundamentally, about the company&#x27;s viability and therefore your paycheck.  In a large company I think the major stress is knowing whether you still have a voice that carries any weight.<p>Anyway, it was a great post and I thank the sharer of it :).