Opinion on company sizes

TheFORCE

Where would you rather work? Big company 10k+ users or small company 1k-5k users?

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OctalDump

5k users is small? Is there that much difference between 5k and 10k?

I think under 100 users is small. I've done work for "companies" with 1, 2, 3 users. Maybe 10s is small, 100s is medium, 1000s is large and 10,000s is something else.

Just looking at the stats, if you exclude government and military, there's about 100 companies globally with 100k employees. Not all of these would be "users" since there are a lot of manufacturers and retailers in that list where most workers would have little IT use (ie dedicated computer, email accounts, logins etc).

In USA, there's about 1000 companies over 1000 employees, and about 10,000 companies with between 1000 and 10,000 employees.

Apparently, there's about 30 million businesses in the US. Most are smaller than 500 employees. About half of people work for companies with fewer than 500 employees.

Just found a very nice source from US Census:

Very small enterprises - Fewer than 20 employees
Small enterprises - 20 to 99 employees
Medium enterprises - 100 to 499 employees
Large enterprises - 500 or more employees

Christian.

As most things, both of them have their pros and cons. Doing a generalization, I prefer today a big company as the budgets they handle are way more substantial and that impacts the technologies you will be able to implement/support, and the projects you can be a part of. In smaller companies (I agree with the second comment, around 5k isn't small), you will probably not be able to do the same, you will only touch the surface of many things.

In my experience, smaller companies helps you a lot more to gain real experience in a lot of areas as you will probably be doing more than one role, something that won't happen in a big company where your focus will be only in a specific area and won't be able to do more than that. The main issue with bigger companies is the bureaucracy, something you probably won't deal in a smaller place. I hate that part of my job where a big chunk of time is spent in paperwork, approvals and meetings.

I think it mainly depends on what type of role you want. If you want to be the king of a certain technology (let's say, Cisco CCIE), you won't have a lot of challenges working in a mid-size company. In the beginning it can be best for one to be in a small place to learn a lot and define what one likes, and then jump to a bigger place to play with more expensive toys.

Expect

In smaller companies (especially startups), you will often be JOAT, this means you will be messing with loads of different technologies, and learn a lot. you could be the only person doing networking, security or open source, etc.

in larger companies (1000+), you will most likely be part of a team that specializes in a certain technology, it has good and bad sides as well, bigger companies have larger infrastructures, this also means more technology and more production environments to be responsible of.

In terms of self development and advancement, I truly believe it is up to the company at the end of the day, I for one work for F5 Networks, a 4000+ employees company, probably one of the only large enterprises I worked for that still gave the feeling as if you were working for a medium company in terms of responsibilities, new technologies, growth options, and so on.

you could work for a small, 100 employees company, which does not give you the freedom to mess with new technologies and learn them due to different reasons. it all depends on the management and the company's culture.

paul78

Trying to compare company preferences by size is tough. For me, 2 other factors such as business industry and market segment will always trump company size.

Given a 100-person company in financial services versus a 10,000 person-company in manufacturing - I will always pick the 100-person company.

But...

Given a 10,000-person company in financial services versus a 100 person-company in food-services - I will always pick the 10,000-person company.

Caiyenne

Rather work in a smaller company to be honest. I currently work in a very large company (40,000+ users worldwide) with the core IT structure based in the USA. Change and upgrading systems in this huge organization is verrrrrrrrrrrrrry SLOW. HOW SLOW IS IT?? Soooooo slow we still have users with systems that are on windows 2003.. not kidding! Imagine trying to ensure that everything on your network works for everyone on all legacy systems! (cause company is too cheap (or just unwilling) to give everyone a newer laptop/desktop to support the latest OS). Yet shareholders enjoy record profits!!! Welcome to business as usual in corporate USA!

kohr-ah

I support a 5k user base now and I feel it is the perfect level. I'd like to stick right around this if I could or smaller.

My neighbor works for a very very very large 50k bar company and is bored as hell cause all the time it takes to get something done because of steps A to K vs me going A to C.

Kinet1c

Smaller = better imo. More exposure to different things.

OctalDump

Caiyenne wrote: »

Rather work in a smaller company to be honest. I currently work in a very large company (40,000+ users worldwide) with the core IT structure based in the USA. Change and upgrading systems in this huge organization is verrrrrrrrrrrrrry SLOW. HOW SLOW IS IT?? Soooooo slow we still have users with systems that are on windows 2003.. not kidding! Imagine trying to ensure that everything on your network works for everyone on all legacy systems! (cause company is too cheap (or just unwilling) to give everyone a newer laptop/desktop to support the latest OS). Yet shareholders enjoy record profits!!! Welcome to business as usual in corporate USA!

So what you do is the build the business case for upgrades. Say that we have this much risk from our current set up. That it costs this much due to lack of flexibility. That for this much investment, we can save this much money. Look I just made you $11millions!