How to Survive and Thrive in a BigCo

Intro: who I am, and why this talk

I've come in and out of smaller places, larger places, places that have been acquired, boring places, innovative places - all manner of stuff. I've even worked in strategy and M&A in addition to programming and whatever it is I do now. I'm on Josh Long's team, so ostensibly I do similar sorts of stuff to what he does. And over the years I've kind of collected together what I do to stay sane and be profitable at a personal level in large organizations - and also try to be able to morally sleep with myself at night. So this is a collection of some of those things.

There's a related thing I've worked on for a little while called The Business Bullshit Dictionary. It's a good way to filter if this talk might be applicable to you: if you've encountered phrases like the ones in the dictionary one or more times a month at work, this talk might have something for you. There's also an O'Reilly video series that goes over a lot of this in more depth if you want a certificate.

The 360 review: the "270 review" rule

Let's just randomly pick, maybe, the most useful one to have as far as helping support your peers: the 360 review. Whenever you're in a job you get performance reviews. They're framed as "we'd like to give you this feedback so that you can grow and mature," but really they're figuring out if you're worth what we're paying for. You get an individual review from your manager. Maybe a self-review. And every now and then, you get involved in what's called a 360 review, where they go out to all of your peers and ask them what they think about you. When I've been involved in these, it's usually: what's good, what could they improve.

Here's the point of the 360 review - and your manager maybe won't tell you this. If you're asked to give input on a 360 review, there's an unwritten but now-spoken rule amongst us workers: you skip that question that says "what can they improve on." You just leave it blank. You don't say anything negative about your peers, even if you feel like "ooh, wouldn't they like to know." You can go tell them privately if that's your thing. But that is going in their file, in their record - a tool that can be used by people you didn't grant access to your knowledge, to do something not cool. So: if you're ever involved in a 360 review, and someone asks you what the person could improve on, say nothing. Give them a good 270 review.

What a big company is

Let's level set on what a big company is. Most of this stuff only applies to big companies. Small companies have a different dynamic. Of course, you can have a big company feel at a small company. People say "small company feel at a big company" but I don't know if that really exists.

I think a thousand people is almost too small. Ten thousand is better for a big company. But mentally, the shorthand is: if you've ever found yourself talking about "them" - "they won't let us do this," "they told me I have to do this," those people over there - you're probably in a big company setting. A bunch of silos and groups that need to coordinate. That's where a lot of the 360 reviews and other framework stuff comes in. Instead of just people talking with each other and syncing up, they rely on a framework of how they're operating.

Whatever a company says its mission is: they want money. Money comes in, it costs them what it takes to run things, and what's left over is profit. Keep that in mind as the basics of what your organization is doing.

Then you have the multiple groups. Judging by how much dry cleaning most people in this room do, I'm guessing you're towards the bottom of the stack - individual contributors, workers, the people doing the stuff. Then middle management - the measurers, as the Cloudflare CEO recently put it. Then outside consultants, thought leaders, strategy people. All the way up to management.

Especially in an American company, and more or less in Europe as well: at the individual level, you're getting cash as compensation. You might get nice vacations, but as you go up the stack, what people are getting is equity. Stock. A share in the company. The motivations at each level are different. Down here you're trying to maintain your steady cash flow, do your job. Up there, they're interested in the overall value of the company.

In tech, two important distinctions to remember. A lot of the career advice you'll read comes from people in tech companies and people in startups. The way tech companies operate is very abnormal. The way startups operate is very abnormal too - the goal is to build up the perceived coolness so someone either buys the company or you have a public offering, and then someone else figures out how to profit off of it. In a normal company, there is no exit. It's just forever. There's no major event where cash extraction comes. That shorter time horizon in tech companies affects how people think.

You as a P&L

Companies are very into telling you what their culture is and how they want you to fit in. I would take everything they say as the baseline culture and start to act like a company acts. Think of yourself as a P&L - a profit and loss. How much is coming in to you, the worker? How much expense, time, effort, sanity is going out? What's left over for you? Manage that basic equation.

Now, sure, having fun and putting a dent in the universe - maybe that's part of the revenue too. But beyond just doing a good job, figure out what your cash flow is, what your profit is in the situation. That's exactly how most big organizations work. The people at the top of the pyramid, they don't get together at the end of the year and say "we did a good job, see you later." A few companies focus on not being terrible. But they usually change their mottoes around from "don't be evil" to "sell more ads."

Craft your character in the story

This is something one of my bosses at Dell indirectly taught me. Think about the organization as an ongoing story - a book, a TV show, an audio drama, whatever. Think about yourself as being a character in that story. What is your character? What's your role? Not just identifying what it turns out to be, but identifying what you want it to be, and then crafting it.

Maybe I'm the character who's the programmer everyone goes to when something's broken. Which - we've read The Phoenix Project or we've been told we need to read it, so we know that's terrible. But it's cool for a book. Maybe you're the person who's friendly and cheery, or the one who fixes things. Figure out how you fit and cultivate it. This ends up defining your responsibilities, your roles, and how people in the organization perceive you. If you think about it in a programming way, it's kind of like their perception of your API. When they interact with you, they'll do it through that perception. So craft what you want the API to look like.

One thing: if you want to just be left alone to do your job, you should never suggest a better way of doing something to a large group of people. Because then you're going to have to do something about it. Think about your role and how you want to behave. And once you figure it out, remain consistent. In a David Lynch movie, it's cool when characters suddenly become a whole other character - Lost Highway, right? It's also not great at the box office. Large organizations don't like chaos. Figure out what your role is, remain consistent, and change it very carefully over time.

You can be a wild person all over the place. That's the character with a long LinkedIn profile of places they've worked. There's a great phrase - I should put this in the dictionary - a resume-generating event. If that's the character you want to be, it's very entertaining for the rest of us. So do it.

Homework: avoid getting assigned it, use it to filter requests

Homework is something you have to do that you kind of don't want to do. Some people enjoy doing homework, but you wouldn't usually call it homework if you wanted to do it. It's some labor you have to do that isn't the stuff you'd rather be focusing on.

If you want to be the character that's left alone, the main thing is to avoid being assigned homework. You get assigned homework in all sorts of ways. I've been told several times that I say yes to everything, which probably explains why I see a therapist frequently. Maybe I should say no to them more frequently. You get involved, you talk with people, and very often you get "oh, could you take a look at this?" "Could you give me your feedback on this?" That's another form of homework. They probably do want your feedback, but usually that's not part of your job, and now this is extra work you're being given.

There's a good way to avoid homework - which is also a good way to filter what's worth your time. Ask about the dates, the requirements, and the budget. Assign homework back to the person asking. If someone comes to you asking for feedback on a design or a proposal, before doing it, ask them to do a bit of homework for you. If they're not willing to do homework to assign you homework, it's low value to them and probably not something you should pursue.

For example, if someone says "could you go look at all this code and tell me what you think," and there's no documentation or design diagrams, you can say "could you give me some design diagrams first?" They now have to spend time to show it's worth their while. Three things that are always worth asking for:

• Requirements. Why are you doing this? If people don't have answers, they're probably dreaming up things and hoping you'll figure it out.
• Dates. When do you need it by? "Whenever" means it's low on the list. They're outsourcing their workload.
• Budget. This is the worst kind of homework to be blindsided by - someone comes to you with a big exciting project, you work on it for a few months, and then you find out there's no budget allocated, and now your job is to go put together a whole proposal for why there should be budget. You've done the work that they should have done to make it an official project.

So: be very careful about being assigned homework, and use it as a way of establishing the collaborative playing field.

Hiding out to innovate

You want to innovate, do cool new things. In a large organization, realize that most big organizations don't want to innovate. If you work in a big org you've probably had "why don't we do this brilliant thing?" - and for some reason it's not done. Going back to establishing your character and being consistent - big companies don't like a lot of innovation because it's extremely risky and chaotic. You could spend all this money on something new and then you have to live with, say, one of those voice things from the 2010s that don't really work out. Innovation is taking on risk to damage your current business potentially, which is frustrating if you like doing new things.

If you do want to innovate, the best way to go about it is what I would describe as hiding out. Carve out space where the large organization doesn't discover it. Because once it does, imagine 3,000 people giving input on what you should be doing - people in that homework mode who don't have any control or budget but want to set up a meeting to align on your priorities and your slides. You'll get eaten alive.

Case study: my friend Barton George at Dell. If you go work at Dell, or if you know developers who know Dell, the first thing they say - other than congratulations - is "you know, I'd really like to go to dell.com and order a laptop that just ships with Linux." Every single time. Barton was like, we should do that. He spent about two years - and this is a good level set on what innovation in a big company is - and eventually shipped Project Sputnik: the XPS 13, their MacBook Air equivalent, running Ubuntu with a partnership with Canonical, in 2012.

The way he did it: he didn't engage with the official way of innovating. He didn't get into the annual planning process, didn't figure out his total addressable market, didn't do any of that. He just talked with people, built up a network from the bottom, got into the meetings where the software could get on the hardware. Very unofficial. The line lasted through something like twelve generations of laptops. If a laptop line survives that long, it means it was profitable. But if he'd gone in 2010 with "hey, I've got an idea," the response would have been "developers don't buy anything." That's the common sentiment for people who sell things.

Try to just do it on your own until you can't do it on your own anymore, because you're going to be crushed by the organization otherwise. And as my IBM friends say: at IBM you're never given a new job, you're given an additional job. You still have your day job. This becomes extra energy. Which gets back to thinking about your role in the story and how you want to spend the energy you have.

Mentors, and - more importantly - champions

If you work in a large organization with well-trained HR people, at some point you'll be told you should get a mentor. You might even have an official mentor program - which, I've been in one, very weird and awkward, but whatever. Mentors are fine. What I want from a mentor is someone I can have some work therapy with, someone who has more experience getting by in this type of organization than I do, so I can be like: is this bullshit or not? Tell me what you'd do about this.

One thing I learned early on is: you want mentors, but you also want to cultivate champions. Your mentors can do this, but it's not necessarily in their role. Champion is an apt word. What champions do for you is they fight for you or advocate for you. They do things on your behalf in an area you otherwise couldn't access. Just like a mentor, you want a champion who's not in your same group, a few levels above you. Someone more powerful than you, who you get friendly with, and who you can ask to do things for you.

Back to Barton - he had several champions. He'd just say "I've got to get in that weekly what-stickers-we-put-on-the-laptop meeting, because those are the people I need to talk with." He had an ask, and a champion could get him in.

Now, the reverse relationship. As you might expect, the higher up you go, the less honest access people have to what's happening at the bottom. Your champions and mentors want to know what's actually happening down at the do-level. That's part of what you give back in return - an honest assessment of what's going on at your level. Cultivate those relationships, know what you can offer them.

Presentation craft: a document that's been accidentally printed in landscape

This is the most important section if you work in a big organization and want to get more involved. My friend Mark Cathcart - always an IBM person, right, who used to work on some gobbledygook storage array in 1970-something and slept on a mainframe at ExxonMobil and warmed up his curry on the mainframe floor - Mark once summarized the importance, as you go up the big organization, of being good at presentations. It's quite incisive.

Unlike these slides and a lot of what you'll see at conferences, corporate slides are extremely different. All the great presentation secrets of Steve Jobs, all the TED Talks - just ignore all of that in a large organization. You don't have big pictures and single words. There's a rule that a presentation should require you to be there to give it - it shouldn't stand on its own. In a big organization it's more important to think of a presentation not as a presentation, but as a document that's been accidentally printed in landscape.

Once you have that mental shift, it clicks. A presentation is a social artifact. It gets used more outside of being presented than during. It gets emailed around. People use it as a reference. They look at it on their own. They might even - horror of all horrors - use it for project management. Those 300-slide decks with dates and project notes. PowerPoint is a very powerful tool - it's right there in the name.

So think about a presentation as a document instead. Here's what that looks like. Normally you'd have a document that says "here's an issue we have, I'm discussing it, here are some charts." The corporate presentation is a condensation of that: a big quote, a conclusion. You're doing one of two things - telling people what you want them to think, and telling them what you want. And giving them proof.

A slide with a lot of text on it - normally you're told never to do that. But that kind of slide is gold for a corporate presentation. Again, it's a document accidentally printed in landscape. This is going to be sent around; people are going to read it on their own. It's mentally disconcerting because everyone's told not to have a lot of words. But use it judiciously.

One of the best micro-tactics: the McKinsey title. If you can achieve a McKinsey title, that's the pinnacle of professional awesomeness for deck makers. Normally the easiest thing to do with a slide is describe what the slide is - "a developer toil survey has questions." That's a stupid title. Instead, use the title to tell people what you want them to take away, what you want from them. Use the title as an argument. Instead of "here are common metrics used by DevOps organizations," write "use metrics to build trust in your organization." What action do I take from this slide?

The other important thing: most organizations or groups have a house style - the way they do presentations. Notice this if you study it. When someone has their own way of doing slides, it's very difficult for the organization to understand what's happening. Adapt to the house style. The people who decide things, who give you budget, who give you permission - their brain is programmed to consume information in that presentation format. Figure out what they see most frequently. Do they like McKinsey slides? An executive summary? An executive summary with one big line and one small line under it? Craft things that way.

Have an ask

If you want to move around in an organization, always have what they call an ask. An ask is what the word means - something you want from someone, something you want to ask them. In some cultures this is called an elevator pitch. The importance of an ask in a large organization, especially if you're innovating: you'll randomly encounter people who could give you something if you just knew what to ask them for.

In Barton's case: I want to ship this laptop. I've got to certify for these markets. I need to figure out how to work with Canonical. I need to know the roadmap for laptops next year. He always had these things in his head - if I met the right person, I could ask them this. In figuring out your role in a story, what are the things you would ask people? And then - the part I always mess up on, because despite being at the individual level I don't really like talking with strangers very much - you actually have to ask them. Which is sometimes difficult. But think about what you want, and have those asks ready in your back pocket.

Price yourself, and know what you'd rather be doing

Back to the beginning - the P&L framing. It's not that straightforward as an individual, but start thinking: how do I act like the company? What's my revenue, what's my expense? Is it really worth my time to work more than 40 hours? Is it even worth my time to work 40 hours? Can I just get by with not doing that? What do I actually need to do to achieve my part in this story?

Many people I encounter in tech suffer from having nothing else they're interested in. If you're thinking in terms of revenue, expenses, and profits - literally or metaphorically - pricing becomes important. How do you put a price on your time? Pricing is a dark art, mystical and magical. One way to figure out pricing is: what would I rather be doing? Do opportunity costing. I could put this amount of effort into the big company, but that means I'm not going to have time to paint my Warhammer miniatures. Or help my kids with homework. Or just go to bed early. Build up your strategy around the other things you'd rather be doing. Figure out your pricing, so you can manage yourself like a P&L.

You don't want to be in the situation of not knowing the price of anything - including yourself.

Books, and one last cultural note

There's a certain interpretation that this comes off as cynical and dark. I don't know. I think it's just how things work - a dismissive amoral way of saying something's okay. But in my experience, it is what happens, and people are totally fine with it. This is how organizations function.

Two great books if you're interested in how this stuff actually works. First, Moral Mazes. Fantastic. A bunch of studies from mostly consumer packaged goods companies, conversations the author had with middle management and other layers to figure out how they actually work. Done in the late '70s and early '80s. You might be thinking "the age of typewriters doesn't apply here" - but it's all very similar. Second, Wolf in CIO's Clothing. A modern rendition - Machiavelli for digital transformation. Brief, fun, gives you a different mindset.

One more recommendation, especially if you're working with multiple nationalities: The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. It'll give you all sorts of ways of understanding how to work with people outside of the culture you grew up with.

One example from that book - one last piece of business bullshit. I'll call it the American performance review. I'm American. I live in Amsterdam now, so I'm getting a little deprogrammed. The thing about us Americans: we like to deliver what I call the reverse shit sandwich without the top piece of bread. The open-faced reverse shit sandwich. There's something bad to tell you. We're going to talk about all the delicious Nutella and chocolate spread, all the great stuff in the middle. Maybe it's not even a sandwich - it's whatever that dry crispy cracker bread is that people around here really like. For a 45-minute meeting, we talk for 44 minutes about how awesome that sugary stuff in the middle is. Then at the end: "Oh, also, I heard that people are having some difficulty with your code reviews, so maybe you should look at that." And the meeting's over.

Three or six months later, at your review: "Hey, how's it going? Let's talk about the jelly and the chocolate spread." Then: "Hey, we have a problem. I mentioned to you that you should pay attention to how the code reviews were going, because people were complaining, and you didn't do anything about it." And you're like: "What? You talked about that for thirty seconds." Congratulations. You've received the open-faced reverse shit sandwich.

The point The Culture Map makes is that you've got to identify when a manager is talking with you like that. All that stuff about the Nutella was nonsense. You could ignore it. That last bit was all that mattered for the meeting. Obviously, here in the Netherlands, it's not necessarily like that. Which is great and bad depending on how you like to live.

So - hopefully some things helpful here. There's the video series, all sorts of terms and what I think they actually mean. With that: you've survived another conference. Congratulations, and thanks.