That depends totally on the job. If it's a well paid megacorp job - very safe, but far from something that might spring ideas in your head, you're locked in a little corner doing your thing. Only in small companies the business side of things is transparent enough for the technical people.
If it's a well paid megacorp job - very safe, but far from something that might spring ideas in your head, you're locked in a little corner doing your thing. Only in small companies the business side of things is transparent enough for the technical people.
This is exactly the opposite of my experience. The bigger the company, the bigger the problems, in both number and size. It may seem counter-intuitive, but I have worked in many "megacorps" and you'd probably be stunned by the extent of their needs and their difficulty getting them fulfilled. I have hundreds of ideas accumulated over years of enterprise programming that I'll probably never have time to get to.
Sometimes I think it would be a great idea to put a tiger team of hungry programmers together with the right enterprise users. But since that rarely happens from within, attacking their problems from the outside is still probably the best approach.
I worked for a 400 person company. The business side of things was very transparent. Maybe if there were 20,000 employees that'd make it less so. But at 400 employees, I could listen in my office for conversations that I found interesting, join them and then create a solution in a day or two.
It's also easier to justify a fix. If you can save 5 minutes a day for 100 employees that's one man-year of work saved. If you can do that for the most annoying process of the day that's worth at a least $35,000, plus any moral issues.
Keep your eyes and ears open and don't focus just on IT systems to improve, focus also on other systems that you can get in there and improve through your engineering mindset.
Maybe I'll just clarify what I mean by a megacorp. I'm talking from experience at working for a company with well over 100k employees. My most motivating and entertaining jobs were in companies with less than 50 employees. These however were the most tiring, so bootstrapping and "side thing" was out of the question.
