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Megacorps-are-not-your-dream-job.md (4815B)

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title: A megacorp is not your dream job
date: 2021-01-01
---
Megacorporations[^1] *do not* care about you. You're worth nothing to them.
Google made $66 billion in 2014 — even if you made an exorbitant $500K
salary, you only cost them .00075% of that revenue. They are not invested in
you. Why should you invest in them? Why should you give a company that isn't
invested in you 40+ hours of your week, half your waking life, the *only* life
you get?
[^1]: EDIT @ 23:37 UTC: It bears clarifying that I'm referring to extremely large companies, at or near the scale of FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google). Hundreds of billions of dollars or more in market cap.
You will have little to no meaningful autonomy, impact, or influence. Your
manager's manager's manager's manager (1) will exist, and (2) will not know your
name, and probably not your manager's name either. The company will be good at
advertising their jobs, especially to fresh grads, and you will no doubt have
dozens of cool project in mind that you're itching to get involved with. You
won't be assigned any of them — all vacancies are already filled by
tenured staff and nepotism. You're more likely to work on a product you have
hardly ever heard of or used, doing work that doesn't interest you or
meaningfully impact anyone you know.
A business doesn't get a billion-dollar valuation (or... ugh... a
trillion-dollar valuation) by having a productive team which takes good care of
its employees, rewarding them with interesting projects, or quickly correcting
toxic work environments. A business might get millions of dollars, at most, with
that approach. The megacorps got their 10th figure with another strategy:
ruthlessness. They create and exploit monopolies, and bribe regulators to look
the other way. They acquire and dismantle competitors. They hire H1B's and
subject them to payroll fraud and workplace abuse, confident that they can't
quit without risking their visa. Megacorps are a faceless machine which is
interested only in making as much money as possible with any resources at their
disposal, among those being a budget which exceeds most national GDPs.[^2]
[^2]: Political side thought: Amazon's revenue in 2019 alone exceeds the GDP of 150 sovereign nations. Is undemocratic ownership of resources and power on that scale just?
If anything goes wrong in this heartless environment, you're going to be in a
very weak position. If you go to HR[^3] for almost any dispute, they are
unlikely to help. If you quit, remember that they will have forced you to sign
an NDA and a non-compete.  You're rolling the dice on whether or not they'll
decide that you've overstepped (and they can *decide* that — the terms are
virtually impossible not to breach). That .00075% of their annual revenue you
took home? They could easily spend 100x that on lawyers without breaking a
sweat, and money is justice in the United States. You will likely have no
recourse if they wrong you.
[^3]: Quick reminder that HR's job is to protect the company, not you. This applies to any company, not just megacorps. If you have a problem that you need to bring to HR, you should have a lawyer draft that letter, and you should polish up your resume first.
They may hurt you, but even worse, they will make you hurt others. You will be
complicit in their ruthlessness. Privacy dragnets, union busting, monopolistic
behavior and lobbying, faux-slavery of gig workers in domestic warehouses and
actual-slavery of workers in foreign factories, answering to [nations committing
actual ongoing genocide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_genocide) —
this is only possible because highly skilled individuals like yourself chose to
work for them, build their war chest, or even directly contribute to these
efforts. Your salary may be a drop in the bucket to them, but consider how much
that figure means to you. If you make that $500K, they spend 1.5× that
after overhead, and they'd only do it if they expect a return on that
investment. Would you give a corporation with this much blood on its hands
$750K of your worth? Pocket change to them, maybe, but a lot of value to *you*,
value that you could be adding somewhere else.
They won't care about you. They won't be invested in you. They won't give you
interesting work. You will have no recourse if things go wrong, and things are
primed to go wrong. They could hurt you, and they could make you hurt others.
Don't fall for their propaganda.
Megacorps are, in fact, in the minority. There are tens of thousands of other
tech companies that could use your help. Tech workers are in high demand —
you have choices! You will probably be much happier at a small to mid-size
company. The "dream job" megacorps have sold you on is just good marketing.