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…

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