Why is that, though? I could never see myself working for a megacorp like that and especially not one of the dubious ones that you shouldn’t trust.
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Because they have the resources that others don’t. The megacorps can offer things like:
- Access to genius co-workers
- High pay, stock options, and indefinite job security
- Massive scale problems and infrastructure. Want to work on or with Exobyte scale data stores? Want to leverage 5k node clusters? Contribute to a product used by hundreds of millions of users, devices, etc?
- Want to work on the next big thing? Something we expect will be big in 2 years, not necessarily to be delivered in the next two quarters.
There are opportunities at megacorps that simply don’t exist anywhere else. There are down-sides, for sure. If the company is enabling you to do what you love, on a scale few can match, why would you leave?
I don’t work for a megacorp on this list, but I can understand the attraction of working for one. I would assume that the top X% of workers, are very happy there.
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Career and personal priorities
Many people jump with joy when they are hired at a slow big company that maintains Java or PHP mastodons for 10+ years; many make a career out of that, go and speak on conferences, make a big professional network of contacts etc.; and even if they get fired they can very easily get employed in the same filter bubble. This is entirely OK, I have no quarrel with these people – I happen to believe many of them become narrow-minded with time but even that is not necessarily bad; us the techies forget it’s not ALL about the tech, very often.
Learning
And then there are people like myself who want to become more and more efficient and learn more and more with time. This came at great personal and financial costs but I just could not be different – at 38 I am still as enthusiastic about learning and improving myself and my customer’s businesses as I was 20. And I still want to learn so much more. I accepted that I am going the path less traveled but I can make a compromise if really necessary. There are many others like that.
Culture
IMO the culture in the offices and teams determines a lot of the motivation to stay or leave. Some even have political camps (eww) that bully people with opposing views. There are many offices where the “rockstars” are plain old a-holes and other talented people quit because they don’t want abuse in the office. Other places are friendly but people there make snails look fast. Most of the places resist any kind of change. The CTO is like “things are working, no need to change anything” which is very often true except when it isn’t; and then everybody suffers for it. The inability of managers to recognize when do you have to act and make a change, and when to stay passive and just maintain, is the root of MANY problems. But again, us the techies tend to overestimate the importance of the tech stack itself.
I choose employers mostly based on how upfront and realistic they are, and how clearly they communicate their expectations. If somebody starts systematically dancing around very basic questions then I know the place is not for me.
(As an amusing aside, lately I stalked a guy who I used to respect as a professional years ago – he made a career out of WordPress addons. I watched an interview with him and he was listing 10 points about what can be improved in the interns application process… the guy actually said most interns had to improve their cover letters in order to have better hiring chances. I honestly laughed for two good minutes. How far deep down the filter bubble rabbit hole can you go? Interns 18-20 years old sending you 5+ documents and they must also include well-written a cover letter… Fiiiine!)
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