[bquinlan]

>I could be a cog in a giant corporate machine, or I can have a measurable impact where I work.

I think that point can support working for either a big company or a small company depending on what type of impact you are looking for.

I've worked for startups in the past and have had a huge impact on the startup but almost no impact on the outside world because the startups just weren't tackling very visible problems.

Now I work for Google and I have basically zero impact on Google i.e. basically nothing that I can do will ever move the dial in terms of Google's revenue, etc. But I've worked on several projects that have had a big impact outside of Google. For example, I was on a small team (3 people) that developed the Python 2.7 runtime for App Engine (this was a while ago) and I was on another small team that implemented the server-side infrastructure for the Google Home. I also developed the screensaver for Chromecast - which is a tiny tiny project - but still millions of people love it.

[acwan93]

I agree with this mentality. I was at a FAANG company as well, and some of the projects I worked on had a small impact on the company but a huge impact on a certain group. 4% of a billion users is the total population of Canada.

Now that I'm at a startup, I'm making a huge impact on the startup, but it's having very little impact on the outside world and the industry. I guess the hope is that one day the startup will have impact on the world, but very few ever do.

[mediaman]

It's an interesting choice.

Which do you prefer?

I'd prefer having an impact on the company versus an impact on a large number of users, because I would experience the impact on the company every day, but at the big company, the feeling of satisfaction from running into random people who have used what I made would still be somewhat infrequent.

[achow]

> ..but at the big company, the feeling of satisfaction from running into random people who have used what I made would still be somewhat infrequent.

Online forums, discussion groups etc. can makes them very frequent, global, profound and in many cases very visible to your friends & families - who otherwise would not know what you are working at the small startup.

[filleduchaos]

> I think that point can support working for either a big company or a small company depending on what type of impact you are looking for.

For a lot of people, "I want to have an impact where I work" is more about their own ego and sense of importance than about impact on other people's lives. This is not a value judgment, by the way - wanting to feel like more than just another faceless disposable drone is a valid desire.

[lkbm]

It's a more salient feeling. I worked at a school for a while, and you can have deep impact on a handful of lives. It doesn't scale, but you can really feel the effect.

On the other hand, if I submit a patch to Chrome that makes it 0.00001% faster, it's a much bigger impact -- millions of hours saved -- but it's an impact you can only see in aggregate statistics. No individual will even notice the effect, so it's much harder to see or feel. It's more abstract. You have to be pretty analytical to get the same level of satisfaction, even if you've done more to benefit people overall.

[brailsafe]

I'd argue that people conflate "having an impact" with "creating a product" rather than "having an impact" with having visible prestige. I used to think the former, but not after having experience interacting with people who want to be middle managers of middle managers. Those people want power and mostly don't care about impacting anything outside revenue increases that can be easily tied back to their name.

[acjohnson55]

I would suggest that you've had experiences with bad middle managers. I say this all the time, but I only began to appreciate middle management when I became a front-line manager. An effective middle manager makes a whole boat full of people feel secure and strategically focused. They figure out how to leverage the strengths of their front-line managers and senior-level ICs, and how to fill in gaps. They know how to manage upward towards the executive layer, to acquire resources and summarize a great deal of complexity.

[filleduchaos]

Apologies, but I don't quite see what this has to do with the point I was making.

[Apocryphon]

Avoiding the alienation of labor, as Marx might put it.

[jchallis]

The chromecast screensaver is the background on the TV in my Airbnb. Multiple guests have told me how much that screensaver makes them feel at home when they travel, and makes the world a little less strange.

[rmellow]

Fun fact: those screensaver photos are taken by Google employees!

Can't find a source for that, but have many times corroborated that through a Google search. Peter Norvig is one of them.

[Naracion]

I'm unsure which screensaver photos we're talking about--but if it's the nature photography (and others that you can choose from) which play when nothing is casting to Chromecast, then I have at least one instance where I have seen photos by a person I know is a photographer and not a Google employee (Trey Ratcliff).

[mlboss]

Screensaver in chromecast is awesome!!!

[arbot360]

I love the screensaver for Chromecast, thanks for that.