The Enterprise Experience
24 comments
·August 17, 2025keyshapegeo99
This almost entirely applies to any public sector organisation, too - except for:
Remove the comment about ever having to work a weekend
Remove the comment about there being opportunities for (technical) career development
Remove the comment about upskilling / training being encouraged
decimalenough
I'm not sure the opening paragraph's line about "fun and financial profit" applies either.
reactordev
fun depends on the person, some people like masochism.
financial profit, again, depends on the person but those $ENTERPRISE 401k's are pretty nice w/ company matching.
gherkinnn
I can't handle such organisations. I simply cannot. I don't care if they pay 3x, they break me within a few months.
MarcelOlsz
The key is to be on a heroic dose of zoloft.
johnhamlin
Been at $ENTERPRISE for 18 months. This is true it hurts.
Spooky23
Bigger enterprises only care about consistency in delivering what they want to deliver. The actual goals may be set by chasing a number, regulatory process, executive fiat or a million other things.
Rationality as we humans see it doesn’t apply.
solatic
> Then I heard word there are other empires. Some were run by tyrannical rulers with strange idiosyncrasies. I began to hear strange whispers, like the next empire over doesn't write any tests, and their only quality assurance process was an entire off-shore team manually clicking through the application. Or that an empire in a distant land has pyramids of software that touch the sky, crafted by thousands of people over decades.
Other empires besides the British (with plantations of manual QA) and the Egyptians (pyramids): the Mongols (ride in out of nowhere to bombard you with requirements and have ridden away before you figured out whether you actually need to deal with them or not), the Spanish (who insist that El Dorado isn't a fictious utopia of a project with full test coverage, full CI/CD, perfect monitoring, but will add every linter and bit of friction they can find to try to get there), the Japanese (who go to floors and campuses across the oceans to commit career suicide by yelling at random stakeholders that they have displeased The Emperor), the Chinese (their floors are always quiet, good luck finding your way through the Forbidden City of Zoom meetings without a map)...
churchofturing
I really enjoyed how you ran with this thought, it made me chuckle. I've been warring with the Mongols for some time and if history is anything to go off, things aren't looking great.
Thanks for reading!
time0ut
It hurt to read this. I have seen all of this and more.
- Teams that produce negative output for years with no consequence
- Six figure monthly AWS bills on unused resources
- Technical people who can't use a computer
- Constant re-orgs and turn over
It is hell, but it pays. I get my fulfillment building my own things outside of work and dream of the day I can escape.
null
i_love_retros
Also if your preferred method of non urgent communication is message based such as slack, good luck in an enterprise.
Sure you'll get messages, but every one will be "quick call?"
time0ut
If it is a higher up, someone I am actively working with, or someone I know well, then I take the "quick call". Otherwise, I push back and ask them to write out their question somehow.
This ends up a few outcomes, usually positive:
- They give up (pretty common)
- Writing it down helps them to answer the question themselves
- I can directly answer with a response or link to the relevant docs
- We have an actual agenda for the meeting they want to have9dev
I do this in a startup. Mostly when we have an ongoing conversation and it gets too tedious to explain something elaborate in text, when we could just talk it over and maybe share the screen or look at something together.
I get the text-based communication preference, but I’ll stand by calls being far more efficient sometimes.
kimixa
I generally like text even if it might take slightly longer to communicate, as it can then be referred back to later easily, and often the mental effort and time required to put it into words in the first place often means you have a clearer mental model of what you're trying to convey in the first place.
teddyh
People adopt the communication style of others. If the “quick call?” method is common, it means that many of its users don’t want their communications logged, meaning they commonly ask for sketchy stuff. Act accordingly; i.e. always send a follow-up email summarizing what they asked you to do, and give them the opportunity to change their tune.
nlawalker
>If the “quick call?” method is common, it means that many of its users don’t want their communications logged, meaning they commonly ask for sketchy stuff.
In my experience, the reason for most "quick calls" isn't quite this nefarious. It's usually just about making a request for which the asker wants immediate confirmation of handoff, and/or for which they haven't done much thinking or built a good justification, and they are proficient at controlling synchronous conversations to avoid questions and clarifications while still getting to yes.
/cynicism And, there are plenty of people out there who genuinely do prefer the personal touch and talking to others.
SpicyLemonZest
Agreed. I've seen multiple large enterprises where messaging was common (perhaps with a bit more emphasis on emails than normal) and calls were not. It's not an inevitable consequence of scale.
arrakark
Love it. Describes my new job at $ENTERPRISE very well.
pinoy420
[dead]
nabilss
[flagged]
Always worth keeping in mind Remy's Law of Enterprise Software (https://thedailywtf.com/articles/graceful-depredations): if a piece of software is in any way described as being “enterprise”, it’s a piece of garbage.
Joking aside, I was intrigued by the list of good things at the end of the post. Some I could understand, but some seemed to fall into that strange category of things that people say are good but really seem only to lead to more of the things they say are bad. In this list we have:
> There are actual opportunities for career development.
Does "career development" just mean "more money"? If so, why not just say "there are opportunities to make more money"? If not, what is "career development" that is not just becoming more deeply buried in an organization with the various dysfunctions described in the rest of the post?
> It's satisfying to write software used by millions of people.
Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?