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I sympathize to a degree. I've worked in startups, and I've worked in Large Corps, but size alone isn't necessarily correlated with "fun" and startups aren't always good environments, nor do fun startups always turn into a corporate enterprise. I _generally_ prefer the smaller companies but you can find fun and interesting work in larger companies too. I loved working at Macromedia while it was between 1,000 and 2,000 employees (a lot of expansion by acquisition) but did not enjoy working at Adobe when they acquired us -- Adobe had a very corporate mindset, Macromedia almost felt like a whole bunch of startups. I had a blast working for Verizon (no idea how big they were back in the mid-90s but the IT department alone covered an entire floor of a warehouse-sized building), but then I went to work for a much smaller actuarial firm and, while the _project_ was fun, the corporate culture was not. You have to figure out what is important to you ("fun", "interesting" are reasonable goals for work) and what sort of compensation you're willing to take in order to have fun. Are you willing to put up with more corporate BS for a ton of money? Would you rather have more fun and less rules but less money and far more risk (startups can be fun and interesting but also long hours and most of them fail -- I've been at three that imploded but I can't take that risk now I have a family and a home to keep up). Is the tech stack important to you? Important enough that you'll really limit your choice of jobs? Important enough that you'd rather be out of work for months than work with tech you dislike? I've been in IT for... over 40 years now. I've done everything from assembler and COBOL to Scala and Clojure, in companies as small as four people up to many thousands of people. Most of what contributed to my enjoyment at various jobs was the team interactions, closely followed by the problems being solved -- not the size of the company (nor the tech stack: the assembler job was at a large insurance company but the project was fascinating, and the team were awesome; and Macromedia was mostly C++ and Java and some ColdFusion -- but great people and interesting projects). For the last decade, I've mostly done Clojure and I love that and joke that I wouldn't work in another stack... but if push came to shove, I probably would if the team and the problem space seemed fun and interesting. |
I read somewhere that "burnout is inverse of purpose" - as in, do I feel purpose in what I'm doing? which I think ties in a little bit with "is the problem space interesting" a problem is only worth solving if there's a reason to solve it, which sort of becomes what my issue is about.
I think I've come to the same conclusion that while I'm annoyed, it's not at the success or the size of the company; I think there's just been a change in how the relationship between the team and the product exists. Much like what you've touched on, I've realized the fun and spark isn't there.
What used to be "Go physically watch the customer interact with the product; what's a pain point we can fix?" has become "Here's a list of 40 demands that the customer wants yesterday" and that makes it not worthwhile for me. Neither fun nor interesting.
I'm going to dabble with spending time doing my own side projects that I can get the "purpose" from, and see if I can achieve both the paycheck and the purpose by balancing that time effectively. If it doesn't work out for either of us; then it's no worry, I was half in the mind to change jobs anyway.
But thanks for helping me put this into more thoughts and words. It's helpful to experiment with the ideas but I think you're correct; the tech stack has nothing to do with it (for me, at this moment).
(am jealous of working with Clojure though; that always looks fun.)