Over the course of my career I have often been in conversations with colleagues who lament how corporate our employer is becoming. “We’re Microsoft now” was a recurring refrain during my time at Facebook, from 2012 to 2019. Let me explain how feeling corporate is actually a blessing, because it means you’re at a growing company.

Why is it good to be employed at a growing company? A growing company means everyone gets more scope; you don’t have to delicately politick just to get interesting work. It’s easy for any team to hit goals (e.g. increase growth by 15%) by riding the coattails of company growth. Greater revenue and more users mean a return on investment, so investors are happy, and teams have the resources and budgets they need. In general, the vibes are good and folks are optimistic when everyone feels like the company is on a good track and the best days are still to come.

That sounds nice. But why is that associated with being corporate, and why is being corporate bad?

Generally, when people complain about a company becoming corporate, they complain about these two things:

1. New processes, especially ones which add friction to changing how things run.
2. Upward management and political maneuvering being rewarded more readily than direct contribution or even doing what’s best for the company.

At a small or early-stage company, it’s most efficient to have as little friction as possible. If things break, you have few users to complain. Most of the users your company will ever have are yet to be acquired, and you’ll need to rapidly iterate if you hope to build a product they want. As you find that product, and grow a customer base, the potential cost of breaking things increases, and the relative benefit of change decreases (as you now have a product that folks want). So, it actually makes sense to add processes which add friction. Sure, extra friction is is less fun for engineers building new functionality, but it is generally better for engineers on call.

Similarly, as companies grow, human managers need to scale their ability to support growing teams by hiring more managers and adding layers of middle management. The tech industry has not found it as easy to scale the team size one manager can effectively manage, as it has found scaling the number of transitors on a chip, so I don’t expect the need to scale a company’s headcount growth by layering middle management to go away any time soon. The problem is when leaders are separated from what’s actually happening on the ground by increasing layers of indirection. They are thus more reliant on the stories told to them by the leaders they’ve hired, rather than their own personal boots-on-the-ground experience. This does open the

So, both 1 (processes/friction) and 2 (politics) are side effects of working at a growing company.

Now, for a company to not feel corporate, one of these two things is likely true:

1. The company is small, and not growing quickly enough for anyone to notice.
2. The company is already large and corporate.

In either case, the company’s environment won’t feel corporate.

In the latter case, the company is already very corporate, so one wouldn’t notice it on a day to day basis. People tend to comment on the new policies, not the ones that have been around for twenty years.

On the other hand, the small dynamic startup that doesn’t feel corporate probably isn’t growing rapidly enough to require the corporate-feeling changes. It’s fun for a while, not requiring legal review or i18n or even HR. However, most folks working at a startup are there in the hopes that it will grow. Being small enough that you don’t have to worry about anyone sueing you is nice, but most folks would rather work at a company that becomes successful enough that it does need to worry about becoming a target.

The next time you are tempted to complain about the growing corporate-ness of your current employer, take a moment to reflect. Maybe, it’s a good thing.

Footnote: I do not mean “growth is always good and justifies all costs” - that’s the devil’s advocate thesis of The Ugly. My point is rather that being employed at a growing company is good for the employee, and negative side effects of growth do not outweigh the benefits of the growth itself.