The Difference Between Big and Small Companies

Posted by Jeremy Miller on November 24, 2006

Roughly speaking, the first half of my software development career was spent in, or consulting for, Fortune 100 companies.  The last couple years I've been working in mostly small companies.  Here, in a nutshell, is how I see the difference between the two basic environments:

In a big company it's often hard to figure out who knows the answers to the questions you have.

In a small company, it's obvious who has the answers to the questions you have, but they're too busy on 5 other projects to help you.

 

 

About Jeremy Miller

Jeremy is the Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap tool for Dependency Injection with .Net, StoryTeller for supercharged acceptance testing in .Net, and one of the principal developers behind FubuMVC. Jeremy's thoughts on all things software can be found at The Shade Tree Developer at http://codebetter.com/jeremymiller.
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  • http://bob.yexley.net Yex

    Amen. You hit the nail on the head there. Having worked for Northrop Grumman, and then moving to a small consulting company to do in-house custom software development, and now working for an even smaller consulting company as a contractor for Lexis Nexis…that is the best way to describe the difference between the two. At least from our perspective anyway, heh.

  • http://www.geekswithblogs.net/schambers Sean Chambers

    Every other company I have worked for were small companies and you are correct there. I now work for a fairly large school district and I find that it doesn’t follow the same mold of a large company, we have alot of staff but I know pretty much the right area to ask questions and most departments are pretty helpful in helping me out with software development questions.

    Maybe government funded agencies are different?

    Cheers!