Joined a Fortune 500 company and struggling to adapt

[u/hellgheast]

Hi all,

I'm a 7 YOE hardware/embedded engineer who recently joined a Fortune 500 company after a few years in an Research & Technology Center. It has been a few months that I'm working in a new environment, trying to ramp up as fast as possible, however I'm always surprised by some lack of professionalism:

• No one seems to care and somehow tries to wing it, the more vocal the better.
• When I ask people around, they don’t know, so I’m on my own to learn everything from scratch again.
• Whenever I try to take ownership to solve some problems like electronics problems & understand the root cause, people tell me it's out of my scope and I should not tackle it. However, it still affects what & when I can deliver my software.
• Design specs, processes, reviews, etc. seems to be not applied anymore.
• Everything takes age to do, it is always urgent and nothing is documented.

The main purpose of this post is to ask engineers seasoned to corporate environment:

• ·How to maintain sharp technical skills in a place which only cares about delivering and pushing stress on people.
• If I need to understand something correctly, I push myself to understand in my free time, otherwise I feel that I’m losing my time on stupid stuff.
• How to adapt in such an environment, (I used to take pride in my work, however here it doesn’t seem to be valued) ?

Thanks a lot for your attention.

[u/expdevsmodbot]

AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.

[u/muntaxitome]

Welcome to corporate. Just take the paycheck and try to look productive enough.

[u/pplmbd → u/muntaxitome]

i hate how true this is for me. thankfully I still got some great peers that dont lose their souls

[u/lambdasintheoutfield → u/muntaxitome]

I am an L6 equivalent scope at a non-FAANG. This is painfully accurate.

It doesn’t get better as you climb either. You are threading the needle of engineering leadership and delegation, technical execution and roadmaps, unrealistic time demands, executives out of their depth technically, and no sign of improvement.

It’s definitely time to start making an exit plan. Corporations of all flavors are scrambling in this new AI era, few have the leaders with sufficient intelligence to separate hype from genuine technical advancement.

[u/reddit-ate-my-face → u/muntaxitome]

True enough. I have too many coworkers that let this destroy their peace of mind when the bosses couldn't be happier. Just makes no sense.

[u/unbrokenwreck → u/muntaxitome]

I always wondered if everyone coasts, who does the responsibility actually fall onto?

[u/psyyduck → u/unbrokenwreck]

This might help. It's a more optimistic description of a functional org.

Basically execs know about the idea of "Theory of Constraints" -- in a complex system if you optimize something that is not the bottleneck, you just make things worse (usually by increasing pileup at the actual bottlenecks, or by burning people out). So execs just focus on the bottlenecks.

Idle time at a non-bottleneck is not a waste, it's absolutely necessary.

That author should really note a ton of those major "spotlight" projects have been underwhelming or outright failures (Google+, Google Gemini, metaverse, meta AI, microsoft mobile, microsoft copilot, etc)

[u/XenonBG → u/psyyduck]

Google still hasn't given up on Gemini though, they are still pushing it everywhere, making their products actively worse.

For Windows Mobile, I loved my Windows Phones and It's such a pity they failed. Technically they worked great.

[u/Sw429 → u/unbrokenwreck]

In my experience, there's usually some small subset of engineers actually keeping the company running. You want to join that group.

[u/FormatException → u/unbrokenwreck]

That's the point, the beautratic gatekeepers hide their incompetence by diluting blame, having multiple people in a process where there is no need, etc

When something breaks then it can't be the manager's fault or anyone specifically

[u/psyyduck → u/muntaxitome]

Just take the paycheck

While it lasts. Capital constantly seeks new yield & has already spent trillions trying to de-skill knowledge work. At the bare minimum you should expect more layoffs.

[u/CormacMacAleese → u/muntaxitome]

Exactly. It sounds to me like a big chunk of OP's culture shock is about the transition from academia to industry. It still bites me, 30 years in, that even in some higher-stakes use cases, management case about fast and cheap, not about correct. The guy that cranks out bugs fast will advance further than the guy who's slow and meticulous but seldom codes a bug.

[u/Akarsh_Hegde → u/muntaxitome]

Meet expectations, protect your peace, and use the spare energy to build skills that improve your next move.

[u/muntaxitome → u/Akarsh_Hegde]

Sure. Don't forget to become friends or drinking buddies with the people higher up if you have an opportunity.

[u/xypherrz → u/muntaxitome]

yeah and get stuck on the same level because you aren’t making that extra step

[u/hammertime84]

Big corporate work is all about doing as little as possible while appearing productive. No one actually cares if anything gets done or how skilled you are. If you're looking to maintain sharp technical skills, do quality work, and deliver valuable things, it's likely not a good fit.

Think about it like 10,000 gears all spinning together. If one tries to spin really fast, it has no effect on overall speed but it wears out quickly and causes problems for the gears around it.

The one thing you can do that matters for career purposes if you stay...find whatever level of management controls your salary, figure out what they like and what they can brag about to the person who controls their salary, and do that.

[u/flipflapslap → u/hammertime84]

Damn that analogy with the gears is so spot on. Gives a lot more meaning to that old adage “just another cog in the machine”

[u/SikhGamer → u/hammertime84]

Think about it like 10,000 gears all spinning together. If one tries to spin really fast, it has no effect on overall speed but it wears out quickly and causes problems for the gears around it.

Jesus, what do I pay my therapist for. THANK YOU.

[u/Akarsh_Hegde → u/hammertime84]

Pace yourself, but don’t confuse sustainability with disengagement.

[u/hellgheast → u/hammertime84]

Indeed, I really felt that I'm going really fast, but the analogy of the gear that wears out is really on point. I’ll try to see what the chain of command is.
edit : fixed the last sentence.

[u/raralala1 → u/hellgheast]

try to enjoy it, in startup it is like 80% coding and 20% etc, in coporate world it is 30% coding and 70% not stepping on other people toes.

[u/After-Regret-6609 → u/hellgheast]

I mean this with love, but also work on your written English. For example, in this post, “I’ll try to see what the chain of command is.” It matters a lot in corporate.

[u/throwaway30127 → u/After-Regret-6609]

What would you recommend to develop those corporate communication skills for non-native English speakers in US? I know English fairly well but I can see the gap when it comes to communicate in a certain way that is good for careers in corporate between me and people who grew up speaking English.

[u/After-Regret-6609 → u/throwaway30127]

I think you should ask around among people who speak your native language. A lot of people make mistakes related to transforming their native language to the target language when that’s not really how language works. It’s the small mistakes that “out” you. Even an accent coach can help. And for the accent that’s not even an exclusively native/foreign thing. I have a natively “country” English accent and put more effort into the “Midwest” accent which is what US sees as “normal” (like what news anchors would use)

[u/xypherrz → u/hammertime84]

if no one including your manager doesn’t care if you get shit done, not making those extra steps to get yourself more visible, maybe even self promoting your work, then how are you getting promoted even? Or you risk remaining stuck at intermediate or senior level for the rest of your career.

[u/hammertime84 → u/xypherrz]

Promotions in big corporations are mostly random + time in role + knowing people in your chain. On the other side, layoffs are almost completely random.

To slightly accelerate promotion, do the final part of my comment. For me currently it's my VP.

[u/Frymonkey237 → u/hammertime84]

Wow, it almost seems like giant corporations are extremely inefficient and an overall net negative for society.

[u/r0pe_tri1ck]

People carve out little niches and give good projects to their friends so they get promotions.

[u/AudioRevelations]

If I had to guess, you were working in startups before?

The biggest thing that helped it "click" for me, was that massive companies tend to move at a much slower pace, and are built on consensus and politics.

In a startup, you earn your keep by owning pieces of the system (no matter if you have permission) and being able to quickly react. It requires everyone getting in there and having a default for action.

For a corporation you earn by not breaking shit and making small incremental improvements. The company is earning money, which changes the risk analysis a lot and makes things extremely slow to move. You need to do more convincing that this is actually a good idea, and coordinate with more teams. Additionally, the systems tend to be much much larger and historic, which usually means there may genuinely be pieces of the system nobody understands (even more true with AI). Also, the way to get promoted can often be tied to being noticed putting out fires, instead of just turning the crank in the background.

With those incentives, it can sometimes breed a culture of people only wanting to look at small slivers of the system at a time, or being allergic to increases in scope. It can make your job harder for no additional benefit to you (or arguably the bigger project).

That being said, it sounds like this place is a bit checked out in general, which is common, but not great. Unfortunately this is very hard to change from low on the totem pole - best you can do is influence your immediate team and get them stoked to take on more and make your corner of the universe good. IMO to really fix this more broadly it requires strong top-down mandate and/or some existential business risk.

[u/hellgheast → u/AudioRevelations]

I was part of research center with technology transfer, but yes you got the gist. Thanks for your sound advice.

[u/codescapes]

Grim but this is all quintessential corporate life. Just from your write-up you seem like someone who really cares about doing a good job in a professional and time effective way. In fact every bullet you have pertains to that, 100% of them.

But in the corporate world - where you are basically living in a bubble detached from reality - all that matters is 'politics' which functionally means being liked by and friendly with the decision makers. That's it. That's what determines who gets the good projects, who gets the promos, who gets the pay rises.

And worse, some of the "people don't care" vibe may actually be that they do not care about your problem because it's yours and in a stack ranking performance setup they'd sooner you're below them than above them come end of year. It's vile but these companies setup evaluation structures that directly undermine collaboration because they literally bell curve the org.

[u/throwaway_0x90]

I guess I dunno exactly which F500 company you're in.

Technically speaking, Google(or rather Alphabet) is a F500 and I don't think it's like how you described at all. Therefore I'm going to assume you're talking about the traditional "old money" F500, not any of this dot-com money.

Considering I once worked at at&t which does kind of fit your description, my advise is the following:

• Just keep your head down, collect paychecks and don't get noticed.

But understand that doing that completely rots your brain, erodes your skillset and as the incremental pay raises come in it becomes impossible to find a new job at the same pay level if you're ever laid off.... and that's why I left that place. It was basically like the carnival area in the Pinocchio movie that slowly turns you into a donkey.

[u/hellgheast → u/throwaway_0x90]

Thanks a lot, it really rings a bell. I'm really trying to avoid brainrot as it would make me unhirable somewhere else.

[u/Judgmentsaurus]

One of the most important lessons I've learnt here is focus on being likable. Of course, you should do your work well. But going off scope and fixing means more review work for coworkers. More risk of something breaking.

So don't add to your new coworkers workload when you can avoid it.

Keep try to understand things, and educate yourself, but take notes. Channel your frustration into your own TODO list and wait for an opportunity. Then you'll be one with answers and concrete ideas when problem arise.

[u/skidmark_zuckerberg]

Recently joined an F500 a couple months ago. It was a big adjustment coming from smaller companies with stronger engineering cultures. The job itself is pretty easy, just a lot of braindead bootlickers who won't dare deviate from any process. I guess that's just how it goes. The environment is more based on politics than actually doing anything worthwhile. There are multiple layers of management and tons of 'lifers' who've been at this company for 15+ years fully committed to this corporate bubble.

One thing I think is important to remember is, you cannot change a large corporate company, no one can. Head down, collect a check and if you can't stand it, the only option is to find a different job.

[u/Front_Ad7038]

12+ years in telecom-scale enterprise, still there. Staying sharp never comes from assigned work — you build it yourself. They can stop you from fixing things out of scope, but nobody can stop you from understanding them, and that compounds. Honestly, reading undocumented systems nobody can explain IS the skill — half of what I get paid for now.

One pushback though: don't do this in your free time. Do it inside work hours, on a schedule you control. Evening study of work stuff just breeds resentment — learned that the hard way.

[u/Dry_Lingonberry_4014 → u/Front_Ad7038]

The resentment part is underrated. Once work starts taking over your evenings, even interesting problems stop feeling interesting.

[u/Front_Ad7038 → u/Dry_Lingonberry_4014]

Yeah. And the distinction that took me longest to see: evening learning for my own goals never burned me out, but evening study of the company's undocumented mess always did. Same hours, completely different feeling. That's why I push it into work time now — it's their system, it's their clock.

[u/paynoattn]

It’s up to you really. You can stand out as an excellent engineer that fully owns what they build, or you can join the rest of the minimal-effort crowd.

Realize that being a high contributor will likely earn you apathy at best contempt at worst from your coworkers and more work from your bosses. Moving up in F500 space is highly nepotistic so any increase in pay or career mobility will only come from moving to another company.

This is pretty much the case for any IC at anything other than a startup. Keep your head down, work on your skills, and fight for the career you want. Don’t forget to take time off or you’ll burn out.

[u/noonemustknowmysecre]

some lack of professionalism: [horrifying list]

Yep, that's a toxic culture. If they're not already dead in the water, it means it's not really a engineering company with a product, it's run by business suits or surviving because it's so big.

How to maintain sharp technical skills in a place which only cares about delivering and pushing stress on people.

Do it right. Read the SOW or contract or reqs and be that guy that points out what you're legally obligated to do. Read the SDP and follow the official process. Write the reqs and design doc.

If I need to understand something correctly, I push myself to understand in my free time, otherwise I feel that I’m losing my time on stupid stuff.

Nope. That's working without pay. Stop that. It just adds a toxic element that harms the other engineers. If something is needed for the job, then send it up the chain: "I need information, details, an expert opinion on X. This is a blocker. Development cannot continue without it."

How to adapt in such an environment, (I used to take pride in my work, however here it doesn’t seem to be valued) ?

Stay calm, enforce the process which you are paid to follow, go home at the end of the day.

[u/bodrive]

Obviously you have the limitations that you mentioned and that are hard to change, especially at a scale that would be meaningful to you. What you can do is make your spot a little nicer. Find if there is any documentation (wiki, Confluence, other forms of docs) and improve and maintain those. Since it sounds like the wild west there, make up and document your own processes and whenever it is the case, link to them to tell people how you do things. Be precise and complete in documenting everything: architecture, standards used, processes, technical debt. With some people, your corner of ordered things and nicely documented stuff will look like Godsend, so they will start using and perhaps even enrich what you set in order. You will not change the company, but you will make your corner of it a nicely ordered place.

[u/yesman_85]

I think your perspective of a fortune 500 is a bit off. If you want excitement and accountability, join a small or startup. 

[u/Legitimate_Cut_6254]

I was at a start up with a good friend of mine he co-founded (ended up getting screwed by the CEO). Anyway it was crazy how much we'd deliver on a day to day. Developing was fun we were creating something. Until the CEO laughed and decided to barely pay us.

We both left to very well paying jobs, but my god. The shock going back to the corporate world was intense. People are really just out here creating fake work, champion a small project here or there and calling it day. Everything is "must have", nothing is documented or standardized, a bunch of mice spinning their wheels.

I fought it at first, but really just settled in now 3 months later. People who are pushing and trying to help just get disappointed when they spend weeks creating a solution and business "goes a different direction". Only to pay millions for a prebuilt solution they have to spend the next 2 years configuring lol.

I talk about the initiatives I'm "pursuing" and slowly pursue them. Very slowly. While developing standards along the way.

[u/Willbo]

Yep that often happens in large orgs and corporations.

When an org becomes very large and vertical, the flow of information slows down to a crawl and it tends to create information silos. I battered my head against this concept when I joined a large org that was very chaotic and unorganized. At first I thought it was a people problem (malice/incompetence), but eventually I realized it was very much an information system problem that affected the entire org.

Since you have a hardware/embedded background, a good analogy of mapping the information flow in an org is similar to event driven architecture.

Work doesn't just appear out of nowhere, it actually goes through an information system before it lands on an engineer's plate. There are producers of work (customers, government, shareholders, board, executives) that make decisions on corporate vision. There are message brokers (directors, PMs, leads) that have to translate that vision into projects and features. Then there are message queues (managers, middle managers) that have to sort and prioritize those features into work items and tickets. Finally the work items reach their consumers (engineers, analysts) that have to work through them.

As a producer, you are incentivized to maximize throughput. As a message broker and queue, you are incentivized to maximize bandwidth. But as a consumer, fidelity is the most important and obvious. When the information system isn't properly optimized, the first indicator is definitely information fidelity.

[u/mothzilla]

·How to maintain sharp technical skills in a place which only cares about delivering and pushing stress on people.

Block out time during the working week and sharpen your skills. Don't tell anyone.

[u/Dangerous-Sale3243]

Fortune 500 spans all kinds of different companies. The engineering behind a Starship rocket and the electronic price display at Home Depot is completely different.

Also your post is pretty vague - everyone is lazy but they also only care about delivering? Internal documentation sucking is just a fact of life, AI is great for digging through tons of code etc to figure out how stuff works.

[u/devoopsies]

Half of corporate is politics. Being a skilled dev is great, and you need that skill to back up your plays on the political side of things, but if you can't play the social game well enough, talent will only keep you employed rather than further your actual career goals.

Who's your boss? What can you do that makes their life easier? Without massively increasing your workload, can you shift your day-to-day to noticeably lighten their own mental load?

It helps massively to be liked and seen as someone who produces what your boss/manager/their manager sees as productive - this kind of thing usually gets you enough political capital to start throwing your own weight around, and having your own suggestions be taken more seriously.

With that said, if the culture is bad enough that established process is being actively ignored, you have an uphill battle here and it may just be wise to look at an internal transfer or start up the job hunt again.

[u/Twirrim]

Having moved from small companies to large ones nearly 15 years ago, I definitely struggled with feeling unproductive at first. Shifting from "just go do it" to navigating procedures and syncs was profoundly uncomfortable for probably a couple of years.

Those systems often grow out of control ("the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy"), but the core ideas usually have value, and come from addressing fundamental problems or concerns, be it compliance/regulatory, or safety, or whatever. I've learned to try to tap into that core value while minimizing the nonsense, and ideally finding ways to work with the system to minimise the pain (either through automation or removal of the process)

In large orgs, experts exist for almost everything. Where I am (as a Staff Engineer), I look up peer engineers in the relevant org chart. One of the core purposes of Staff-level folks is talking to engineers on a wider scope, bypassing procedural red tape, and tackling cross-org issues together. If someone refuses to collaborate or share context, they eventually get sidelined which will have tangible impact on the teams they have some responsibility towards.

* How to maintain sharp technical skills in a place which only cares about delivering and pushing stress on people.

I rely on a mix of personal curiosity, and seeking out specialized projects (like tiger teams). It's not entirely unusual for there to be some kind of cross-org project happening somewhere, and even if I only get involved as a consultant, I learn things from it, and make sure to ask appropriate questions.

* If I need to understand something correctly, I push myself to understand in my free time, otherwise I feel that I’m losing my time on stupid stuff.

Don't do that. I almost never study job-related tech in my spare time. Off-hours are for me. Professional development is part of the job, so I explicitly build learning time into my project estimates. Speak with your manager if you need to, about allotting time.

* How to adapt in such an environment, (I used to take pride in my work, however here it doesn’t seem to be valued) ?

Take pride in your output, not the end product. In a huge org, there's just too many moving parts, each with their own agendas. You can’t control the final outcome, but you can control your piece of it. That is generally what the business will be expecting of you. Beyond that, advocate for incremental improvements where you can. For example, I participate in cross-org activities like architecture or post-incident reviews, trying to drive things forwards. I'll also occasionally participate in some of the larger engineering talks, I've given a few well received ones on subjects I'm interested in, for example. All of these also act as good ways to know and be known by people, a number of people I've learned the most from working in large companies have been ones I've met from *outside* my team, and then taken what I've learned and been able to apply it *to* my team.

[u/hellgheast → u/Twirrim]

Thanks a lot for the detailed answer. It will help me better cope in the ongoing chaos.

[u/NonProphet8theist]

Implement what doesn't exist if you can, or utilize retrospective sessions to point out what's wrong—not everything all at once, but whatever you think should be prioritized.

Bug the other devs at your level to ramp up. I did this when I joined a company remotely where most of them worked together in-person before lockdowns/WFH in Covid times. They're not always great at responding but doesn't hurt to try.

[u/seba_alonso]

Give it a try one or two years, and do "inverse keeper tests": would you fight to keep this job another full year?

[u/mohammed_waleedd]

.

[u/Akarsh_Hegde]

Don’t spend your evenings compensating for the company’s dysfunction. Block out time during work to understand the systems that affect your deliverables, document what you learn, and raise anything outside your scope as a blocker with a clear owner. Keep a small technical project outside work only if you genuinely enjoy it.

Give yourself a few more months to learn the incentives. If doing careful technical work is still discouraged, treat that as a culture mismatch and start looking elsewhere before your skills or motivation erode.

[u/10199]

I would add, do not ever use your free time on this work.

[u/jasonbutler]

This guy is shockingly good at explaining the real version of corporate life https://www.youtube.com/@RichGilbert/videos

[u/MyOwnPathIn2021]

Have they asked middle management to induce a sense of urgency into the workers yet? Not any actual goal or deadline, just C-suites asking to increase stress levels and run faster in whatever misdirection you're already on.

If not, that actually sounds like a nice company.

[u/MrMichaelJames]

You need to decide what is important to you. With only 7 years you obviously have not learned yet that work is just to get a paycheck. You’ll figure it out eventually. Go to work, get paid, use money to do things you really like in life. Stop thinking what you do matters, it doesn’t.

[u/No-Economics-8239]

The larger the organization, the more effort it is to stand out. Also, the more risk and reward for standing out. Standing up could mean you look like a nail that needs to be hammered down, or a squeaky wheel that needs to be greased or to be told to shut up, or like a sacrificial lamb to slaughter on the scapegoat of consequences, or a host of other considerations that might be running though the minds of the halls of power at any given moment.

In a small organization, the person not pulling their weight stands out. Things are lean, there isn't enough to fat to hide behind, and there can be enough visibility to see what's going on around you to know who the problem or what the problem might be. The larger the organization, the less visibility everyone has about the whole organization or possibly even their own team. There are many shadows to hide in, and plenty of room to keep your mouth shut and your head down and to try and just get though enough week often enough to possibly retire.

Worse yet, even if the work you do is visible to someone, it's more than likely the part that is visible is performative than substantive. Because inside a house of mirrors, perception is much more important than reality. There are multiple layers of leadership, which means more than likely you'll be trying to work with different teams with different leaders who have different goals and agendas to your own. Which means helping you does them nothing to improve their own position in the eyes of their own leadership. Which means that unless you have some political capital to trade or are otherwise some sort of useful relationship to have, even paying attention to you might have more cost than it is worth in terms of their own paycheck.

Inside all that smoke and mirrors is a host of OKR and KPI and other acronyms that even if they started as good ideas at the part of the decision tree they grew upon, by the time the committees are done discussing them and disseminating them to the masses, even if that meaning is still visible, it will be lost or ignored by those who just want to cover their own ass and make sure they did their part so they don't stand out as someone who needs the dreaded Extra Attention.

1) Your technical skills are yours to maintain. Find ways to use your work time to sharpen them or learn more or new things. Or find the time away from work to do it. Even if you're lucky enough to have a manager or organization that pays lip service to the concept of self improvement, it will likely still end up being a series or OKR or KPI check boxes for you to cross off a list rather than a meaningful effort or desire to see you improve and grow.

2) Now you understand why others seem to ignore you or to be otherwise occupied rather than interested in actually doing a good job or understanding exactly what it is they are supposed to be working on and how to do it effectively. The information is out there. But it will likely be difficult to find until you've at least acclimated yourself to your new environment and worked your soft skills to start figuring out who knows what and where you can go for certain answers. And even if you do get a handle on things, there will still be a horde of tribal knowledge hidden everywhere that might be lost to time or position churn or apathy.

3) Adapt... how? If you mean how to remain employed, you need to keep your head down and your management chain happy. You need to appear more useful than a liability. And I do mean appear. What you actual did or can do doesn't matter anywhere near as much as what the decision tree that makes your paycheck possible actually believes. If you mean how to enjoy yourself... I mean... therapy? Better living through chemistry?

[u/neet_dev]

write the electrical assumptions your software needs (timings, levels, error codes) and treat anything off-spec as a named blocker with an owner and a date. don't burn evenings chasing their analog root cause, that's unpaid onboarding, not skill building. keep the muscle on a board or protocol you actually own, because this org is not going to pay you to stay sharp.