[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.