10 reasons not to work for large corporations

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

If you are not ready for such conditions, it is better not to get involved.

UPD. Updated on August 6, 2019.

1. Low income

If the corporation wants to see you specifically, they will offer favorable conditions in order to lure you from your current place of work. Those who submit their own resume and apply for a line position, as a rule, will not be offered much.

You should be grateful anyway for being invited to a company with a name - this can be considered a literal quote from HR managers in some corporations. In addition, the level of income is often influenced by the length of service in this firm. To get a decent surcharge, you will have to work for a long time, and in the first years you will have to be content with little.

Finally, corporations usually have a rigid staffing table. It is not enough to try and be the best for you to get a raise. You need to move up the career ladder, but this can be a problem.

Once I was invited to work in a large media holding. The estimated salary was puzzling: it was half of the industry average in Moscow. In response to my bewilderment, I was told that the very work in the holding is luck and a chance, and I should be grateful to them.

Maria refused to work in the corporation

2. Predictable and slow career growth

A corporation is a colossus with a huge number of employees. The number of bosses is amazing, and behind them there are still deputy deputy leaders.

Accordingly, you clearly see all the steps of the career ladder. But in order to climb up, you have to wait until they are free. You can hope for a promotion for years, and there will be many applicants for the vacancy.

Even if you are a genius, your talent is not visible from the top of the mountain, so the ascent will not be easy.

3. Bureaucracy

Working in a corporation, you will learn how to write a memo on office memos and begin to masterfully fill out all the official papers. This makes sense. Due to the ramified structure of large companies, it is almost impossible to reach out to neighboring departments in any other way, and even more so to get what you want from them. Therefore, you have to write official letters and send them, mentioning your general boss in the copy, so that the addressee does not have the opportunity to jump off.

In addition, official correspondence helps to relieve yourself of responsibility for missed deadlines and poorly performed parts of the assignment for which you were not responsible. If anything, you have proof. True, this does not always help.

For six hours out of eight, I had to write service records, sign them on the buildings of responsible people - while electronic confirmation was not enough, it was necessary to walk. And most importantly, there was absolutely no need for this. When I realized that I was here, rather, a highly paid courier, I ran away.

Natalia left the corporation two weeks later

4. Questionable distribution of responsibility

Your merits will concern someone only if you need to be fired urgently. Basically, everything will rest on the notorious team spirit. If the department is following the plan or doing something cool, then the whole department will be praised. Even if it is only your merit. At each next stage, bosses and departments of various kinds will join these achievements. So in the end, everyone will look the same good fellows, and this can be a shame.

But with responsibility for failure, things are a little different. If this is your miscalculation, then first you will receive censure as part of the team, and then individually - and not only from your superiors, but also from those who have suffered because of you. If you are not guilty of anything, you will still be punished.

I spent my first month at the corporation trying to figure out how and what works, who does what. Why for this question you need to go to this person, and not to this. A separate hell is really getting something out of another person, especially if you're new. At best they will ignore you, at worst they will go to the general manager with a bunch of questions. It's all stress and extra nerves.

Peter worked in corporations twice

5. Much wasted labor

A corporation can afford to have hundreds of people doing work for work's sake. Therefore, sometimes you will have a hard time understanding what you are doing and why. And even if you approach the next project with all your heart, somewhere above, they may change their mind about implementing it - simply because.

One of the saddest options for wasted time is when you have made a report or presentation, and the result of the work has returned to you with a note that it is no good. True, about 10 percent of your work remained there, because at each stage each manager considered it possible to make corrections on his own, and sometimes they contradicted each other. And you have to redo the result of this collective creativity.

6. Wasted time

You will have many meetings, meetings and other discussions. On some of them you will not understand what is happening at all, on others - why you were once again gathered to explain the obvious things. It often happens when a speaker focuses on a certain average employee - that is, in the end, on no one.

In some corporations, the problem with meetings is very relevant: you get together, discuss something, and two days later you discuss the same thing, as if you did not get together at all. And also the responsibility is blurred - so you can spend the whole working week on meetings.

Peter worked in corporations twice

7. Formal requirements

It's easy to manage a small team. Everyone understands what exactly he is responsible for, how this affects the overall result. A small company cannot afford to duplicate employee responsibilities. It's too expensive for her. As a result, tracking employee performance is easy.

In a large corporation, this is harder to do. Moreover, people's activities may be too different to measure their effectiveness, involvement, and so on. But it is easy to establish formal control: fine for lateness, count the number of absences to the toilet. Of course, this has almost no effect on efficiency. The situation is close to anecdotal: "Do you want to check out or go?"

And if KPIs are added to this, then all your work will revolve around one thing - achieving target indicators. How it affects performance is not so important.

8. Substitution of the personal by the collective

The notorious corporate spirit continues to be implanted in large companies. It is logical, because it is easier to love a small company. You are familiar with all your colleagues, you understand what each of them does and what your common goals are. You don't have to reconcile every micro-action, you live your personal successes and failures, and of course pride yourself on being part of something cool.

The names of corporations are usually loud and it is pleasant to tell others about their work. But in fact, more often you have to feign love than really feel it. It is difficult to assess your contribution to a common cause, because you are just a cog. Yes, the system will not be able to work without you, but it is also easy to replace you.

In order to avoid being overwhelmed by this realization, the corporate spirit is being pumped in the team. You are guided towards general great success, and the personal is blurred. And this can be a reason for frustration.

Another unpleasant consequence can be hidden behind slogans like “We are one family”. If the company is your family, why do you need another one? So spend more time in the office and don't forget to come on weekends.

In the company where I worked, the walls of the office were painted with motivating phrases, there was a corner with a library and the best motivating books, employees from all over the country were brought to corporate events. Of course, there were "sectarians" inside, who really lived in a corporate spirit, but most perceived it simply as a quirk.

Peter worked in corporations twice

9. Too Much Communication

If you just do your job well, no one will notice you: too many people. To stand out, you have to participate in conversations, be nice and comfortable for your bosses, laugh at other people's unfunny jokes, go to corporate parties. Wherever you turn, communication is everywhere for the sake of communication, and not the most sincere.

Sometimes you have to make dozens of calls, just to find the person who is responsible for the task you need. And this is clearly not the most productive activity.

10. Monotonous work

In a small company, you are a Swiss, and a reaper, and a gamer on a pipe, and this, let's be honest, enrages you. But at the same time, it opens up great opportunities to try new things.

In a large company, tasks are usually distributed so that everyone is doing something specific - and only him. As a result, you burn out, you have no space to show your talents and go out with initiatives. The latter will be wading through the meat grinder of the bureaucracy for so long that you will simply tire of waiting to see how it ends.