Reading this blog post entitled, “3 reasons to stay in a big company“, I can’t help but comment about some of the points the author made. A brief background first, i’ve worked with some big companies in the past, but all have left a bad taste in my mouth for reasons I will point out later on. I will be talking about my experiences which led me to believe that big companies aren’t all its crack up to be.

Ok lets proceed with the author’s three points:

1. Working for a big company you learn to think big.
   This is definitely true, lots of integration work with numerous big systems, lots of users depending on these systems to be working day in and day out for them to do their jobs, but from my experience these are the systems that are usually slow, always experiencing down times, always have bad usability, and are usually so expensive for whatever reason.

   Having a project laden with all the buzz word technology or design pattern doesn’t usually mean better performance, it just means you can sell it better to gullible clients thinking that you have a scalable solution because its supposedly “enterprise-grade”.  Now am not saying ALL enterprise softwares are like these, but not all teams are able to properly execute a big project. Now the next team/employees that comes in will be the ones responsible in keeping it running and trying to understand/fix the mess piling more crap.

2. Big companies invest money in innovations and staff education.
   In my personal opinion, staff education is useless. Except for conferences, classroom trainings are usually a waste of time for me. The pacing is way slow, usually the instructors don’t teach about the more important things especially when the subject is of a technical nature. Now it might work for some, but I much prefer self-improvement over classroom training any day. Although the biggest bonus in favor of big companies is that you get paid while you’re doing your self-improvement thing if you have the spare time to do it that is.
3. It’s easier to keep work/life balance.
   Maybe if you’re just a grunt, but if you’re up the corporate ladder then you’re gonna be swamped with meetings. The worst part about it is, some of these meetings that you have to attend are in different timezones because you’re a multinational company. So you find yourself spending more time in the office because of this. Now if you’re waaaay up the corporate ladder, then chances are that you have a blackberry, generously provided by the company; now unless you’re an expert in work/life balance, you will find it really difficult to resists in answering that “one last email”.

A bit of a disclaimer though, i’m a freelancer right now, got burned out working for big companies and watching them make the same mistakes over and over again with big projects. I’m enjoying the freelance life tremendously, the projects may not be that big, but the headaches are not that big also. As with all things, there are pro’s and con’s to each side of the argument, the key is finding what is more important to you and what works better for you. Freelancing is not for everybody, and so is working for big companies.