I spent the better part of the last decade at different startups and web companies, but one of my recent consulting gigs led me to a Fortune 500 company. I’ve done work at large enterprises before, but I really did forget what it’s like and it amounted to a rather jarring experience. I’ve entered a deep and dark world of enterprise architecture, frameworks, meaningless acronyms and a cesspool of “enterprise” software where it seems to breed and reproduce uncontrollably. It’s a place with abstraction at every layer, except anywhere that’s relevant.

Sometimes I got a sense that I was warped in time at least 10 years back and that everyone around me was moving at different speed. To paraphrase a famous quote: “It’s not that they are lazy, it’s just that they don’t care”.

I do have to mention some caveats. These are purely observations on IT/Ops and I had barely any idea what was happening on the dev side (which is a problem in itself). I also didn’t have visibility into every part of the organization, so perhaps everything is wonderful in other areas, though I have my doubts.

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