| I dunno about "better chances of getting to the top" in a big company. In a company with 10,000 employees and 5 C-level employees, not everybody gets a shot at a C-level position. In a small company you might just get a position with high responsibility (if little status) that will get you ready for a high responsibility position with more status elsewhere. I once worked at a web design shop where three salespeople who dressed normally, a few goth designers and programmers, and me who dressed "business goth" at the time. (I got along really well with everybody.) The production people got out their anger against the world by designing web sites with black backgrounds for everything. They would have put black text on a black background if it would have gotten past QA. I've been contracting with many big corporations and I've found many where the people are a delight to work with -- I'd imagine these people are happy. Remember also that big organizations are divided into smaller units which are further subdivided. These can have radically different cultures. A major University I know of has many IT cultures. The central IT organization is a disaster, although I know many people who've found comfortable places in it. If you try to get something done by going through official channels this has a 25-40% chance of working. If you have a large rolodex of people you know there, however, you can guess who might know who to call to fix the problem, and eventually find that person, naming by name all of the people who helped you find them. Then I get off the phone and I'm like "damn... I got this guy to change the firewall settings for the campus and how does he know who I am?" I was dealing with another major IT organization and tried to compress the schedule using the same technique. Well, he called his boss, and his boss called my boss, and we got it done. There are so many companies out there with so many parts that there's very possibly some position you could stand to do. |