cdennison

I’ve been struggling with the transition from a startup to a big company and I think this is why: At the startup I felt like I was a marine being sent in to fix an extremely important, immediate problem - if I didn’t kill the bad guy today than people would start to die.

At the big company I feel like one soldier marching alongside five thousand others. We are marching for months on end in order to position ourselves for a battle that we’re being told will occur sometime in the distant future but might not happen (the enemy might change their mind, a new enemy might arise somewhere else, etc.).

Has anyone else struggled with feeling like every day they’re simply “positioning” vs. solving immediate problems?

I’ve personally seen that being strong in certain fundamentals is important – understanding things like testing, SOLID, Code Smell, design patterns, etc.

But I’ve never been on a team where I’ve thought, “If only that person had a better understanding of inheritance/encapsulation/polymorphism than s/he would be more productive.” I’m not questioning whether these form the philosophical foundation of OOP, but can anyone please provide an example of how they practically affect an individual’s ability to contribute?