I’m getting sick of hearing over and over again how cool free-lance developers are. It’s like a cliche or the form of good breeding to talk about their courage and professional skills. I agree, there’s a certain percent of gifted self-employed consultants among them, but nearly the same percent is true with respect to the entire industry. Free-lancers is not an extraordinary caste. Moreover, the most of talented ones are finally being employed by the major players (sometimes, to hold executive positions). It’s inevitable.
My point is that you have a better chance to become an eminent specialist working in a big company. The reasons follow:
- Working for a big company you learn to think big. You can get experience of complex systems design, as big businesses have resources to build the enterprise-scale solutions. The other case is integration of ERP, CRM, ECM, etc. that normally implies using sophisticated integration patterns and adoption of SOA practices. Being a free-lancer, it is doubtful whether you will participate in 50 man/year development process or complex enterprise infrastructure roll out.
- Big companies invest money in innovations and staff education. A lot of businesses invest money in staff education which includes training camps, conferences, coaching. Employees may have some spare time every week for their own activities unrelated to their day jobs (open source projects, reading, blogging). You can certainly spend as much time for self-education as you want being self-employed, but every second you’re not working, you lose money. Secondly, the resources you can utilize. Big companies can spend huge money to buy innovative platforms and software, you can play with.
- It’s easier to keep your work/life balance. As a free-lancer your working day starts early in the morning, when you wake up, and ends, when you go to sleep (or more likely, vice verse). Interrupted with hundreds of coffee breaks, football on TV, having a shower and a million other activities you’ll do, if you stay at home. Unless you’re a time-management guru of a great willpower, you’ll fill more comfortable working in the office and having a limited business day. With a fixed number of hours per week you have less chance of burning out and forgetting how does your wife look like. It’s easier to keep up good performance over a long period of time.
After 4 years of work for a huge enterprise, I’m not going to change the game shortly as I can see benefits clearly, and most probably I will stick to big firms for the next 4 years.
P.S. First of all, thanks to everyone who’ve found time to give a feedback on my post. I had plenty of interesting conversations last several days. Here’s the short summary:
- Majority of freelancers truly think they’re extraordinary (I heard the phrase “freelance is not for everyone” 100+ times yesterday);
- Most of the people, who were against my first point, think that patterns and architecture are just for marketing giving no performance or scalability benefits (like, when you use SOA, REST, “cloud”, “grid” and other buzz-words, it’s easier to sell your ideas to CFO). Afterwards they agree that in some cases architecture is finally important, but add that majority of developers doesn’t know or misuse best practices, anyway. It’s not the argument – majority of people are sluggards (including developers, who’ve came into industry for money), who work 9-to-17, then come home, watch MTV, play computer games, etc. The thing I expected is that many of those who think the architecture is all about marketing have came from the PHP world (well-know source of really bad practices);
- Many people doesn’t take into account that freelancing implies a lot of business activities (searching for leads, turning them into opportunities, making agreements, etc.) that steal time you can spend nourishing your perfectionism, if you work for a big company;
Tags: big brother, corporate culture, self-education, time-management
hmm…here are few more
4. Benefits like health/dental insurance are offered at better rates with more quality I guess. This is my observation in last few years correct me if I am wrong here.
5. Financial institutes respect you more if you have a big company name attached to you. This helps getting loans, better interests and lot more.
Greetings,
Your blogpost is good, but at the same time bad.
Not all companies that are big are good.
There are big companies that doesn’t pay for education or similar.
Even skipping stuff to just get things done as quick as possible to earn more.
So saying that working in a big company is good isn’t always true.
It can really be a difference between them.
/Marcus
Is it feasible to do Big Company by day and free-lance by night? Is anyone doing this with success? You obviously can’t carry as much work load as free-lance part-time, but you can get your foot in the door.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Richard Laksana, Rishi MZLwin. Rishi MZLwin said: http://vasilrem.com/blog/software-development/3-reasons-to-stay-in-a-big-company/ is a good one for programmers [...]
@Priya Your points are abolutely right, though they’re will not necessarily make you a better developer
It’s always safer to hide behind big blue chip, I was there. But atmosphere of a start-up is something so unique that I won’t change it to anything.
Cheers,
Patryk
@Marcus Agree with you. Even Google’s fairy tale in actuality is far from being perfect.
We have a lot of brilliant examples and success stories in free-lance, whilst employees of big companies are often treated as spineless creatures. That’s why my speech is so radical. Working in a big company isn’t always good (well-known “Peopleware” describes lots of sociological problems peculiar to big companies), but in terms of getting a better professional it has some clear benefits that are often ignored.
@Justin By night I’m reading techincal literature and playing with different languages/frameworks to keep up with the industry + reading domain-dedicated books not be narrow-minded, when I develop “vertical” (domain-specific) solutions. I’m not going to change it for several bucks I can earn from freelancing, and ignore the prespectives. But thank you for the suggestion, anyway
@Patryk Your comment is right to the point. Unfriendly atmosphere and corporate culture can outweight all the benefits of working for a big company. And it’s actually one of the biggest reasons why people choose self-employeement.
[...] this blog post entitled, “3 reasons to stay in a big company“, I can’t help but comment about some of the points the author made. A brief background [...]
>It’s easier to keep your work/life balance. As a free-lancer your working day starts early in the morning, when you wake up, and ends
I can’t agree with you on this point. The time I was a freelancer I had near the same situation as you described, but currently I have many friends, that are freelancers who work outside of home: rent separate offices, use coworking centers where they work and communicate with colleagues. I can tell you even more, sometimes we work with freelancers and they usually work in our office together with other employees, also there were time when freelancers rent parts of our office, so they were able to feel “work atmosphere”, share experience with colleagues, etc.
And by the way, now when I’m holding executive position I’m also not splitting work/life into sepatate parts of my life, I don’t really have a defined workday and so…
>> And by the way, now when I’m holding executive position I’m also not splitting work/life into sepatate parts of my life, I don’t really have a defined workday and so…
Only until you get married
Your wife and kids will explain you the difference 
>> I can tell you even more, sometimes we work with freelancers and they usually work in our office together with other employees, also there were time when freelancers rent parts of our office, so they were able to feel “work atmosphere”, share experience with colleagues, etc.
They enjoyed atmosphere of the real office, whereas your employees were casting spiteful glances at them (because freelancers are soooo free and earn times more). Really good way to unite your workers:)
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by rlaksana: 3 reasons to work in a big company – http://su.pr/2HFEIS...
This overlooks a completely different class of developer between someone working for a massive company and a free-lancer – what about those who work for the small shops with a positive corporate culture and also an office and regular work-day? Sure, fewer resources for fun new platforms, but often more focus on investing in employees.
I must say that nice design of blog must attract many visitors. I was reading Your blog for arround 3 last weeks and I’m really impressed.
@wall murals Thank you so much! Giving credits to a friend of mine, Mourk, who gave me some important advices.
BTW, I didn’t mention it anywhere before – the big background photograph was made at Septic Flesh’s concert in Minsk.
Nice post. Thanks
It’s not always true for all big companies and roles.
ДА, вариант хороший
Is there any update on this blog post. I am really interested.
Can i use this blog post as a reference. I am thinking to create my post out of this and give my own insight.. I hope you don’t mind
@Reloveution Sure, feel free to use it!
I like the first point you made there, but I am not sure I could pratcially apply that in a contructive way.