How to find meaning in large tech companies

Why do many people hate working in large tech companies?

The obvious answer is “because organizational dysfunction stops them from doing the things they want to do”. Engineers like to write code and ship things, and if their company’s dysfunction is preventing that, it’ll make them unhappy. Right?

Some people just hate messiness

I don’t think so, actually. If that were the case, those people would be interested in understanding the dysfunction and learning how to work around it, so they can do more of the things they want to do¹. However, many people seem to actively avoid that. They find even contemplating the dysfunction to be as unpleasant as actually dealing with it.

I think the reason for that is similar to why most people don’t like working in a messy room. People — particularly engineers — have a compulsion towards neatness. As I’ve written about before, it’s often our weird internal compulsions that drive our professional selves. If you feel a visceral disgust towards organizational dysfunction, spending any time thinking about it probably feels like being tainted.

In Anathem, Neal Stephenson writes about a strange punishment where initiate scholars are forced to study “The Book”: a text written to be both complex and entirely meaningless. It takes a lot of intellectual effort to master The Book, but there’s absolutely zero useful content there. Studying it is thus a kind of self-damage. In Stephenson’s words, “the punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain”.

Role-playing and alienation

Even if you’re not instinctively repulsed by inefficient organizations, working in one can take its toll. There are many, many things that a large tech company treats as important that are hard to take seriously: OKRs, some deadlines, internal training, attempts to build “hype” among employees, and so on. Acting emotionally invested in all of this can be alienating². Getting good at persuading yourself to act like unimportant things are important is a lucrative but dangerous skill. If you do it long enough, it can feel like importance itself is an illusion.

Before I became a software engineer, I did a master’s degree in philosophy³. When you tell people you’re studying philosophy, many people will ask if philosophy can solve their existential angst: they feel that the universe is very big and uncaring, and that humans make up only a tiny pin-prick of it, and that therefore nothing matters. Philosophers must have written about that, right? What’s the solution?

The solution is to stop doing philosophy. If working in a dysfunctional organization has convinced you that nothing matters, you should refute that by coming into direct contact with things that matter. Go hang out with your kids, or take a walk in the park, or read a good book, or take your medication⁴. In other words, spend less time thinking about work⁵. I think this is good advice. But I also think there is quite a lot of real value and meaning you can get from working in a large tech company. Where is it?

Doing things right at scale matters

At large tech companies, millions of people will benefit from the work you do. If you make an amazing video conferencing app that a handful of people use, you will have to derive your satisfaction from the quality of your work. But if you can make Teams a tiny bit better, you’re making a tiny improvement in the lives of millions of people who use it.

It isn’t easy to make enterprise pieces of software better, for lots of reasons. It sometimes requires jumping through awkward hoops or playing demeaning political games. However, it’s such a valuable thing to do. Every bug you fix or feature you add saves cumulative months or years of users’ time. This is still true if the software you’re working on is steadily getting worse, as most pieces of enterprise software do. Slowing that process down is important!

Software engineering is really hard. Getting anything done in large organizations is also really hard. The intersection of these two hard problems is a nightmare morass of difficulty. It is not for the faint of heart⁶. Engineers from smaller organizations will mock you and invent fantasy stories about what your work is like. But if you can handle it — if you’re tolerant of mess, and if you have a rich enough personal life to be able to treat work politics with a healthy detachment — it is as rich a source of meaning as you could ask for.