I am a software engineer who has 4 years of experience. I worked for 3.5 years under the biggest pharmaceutical company in the country and 0.5 years under the biggest telecommunications company. What made me leave is the amount of abuse, stress and toxicity that those companies let their employees take. This made me question, is this kind of work environment normal for a company to be/that is on the top or successful?
(Please note that by top/successful companies, I mean companies with at least 10k employees and millions or even billions of revenue)
I asked friends and some people working as junior or mid SEs in companies with at least 10k employees, they told me they're experiencing the same or worse, some staying because they have stopped caring and just want to keep their jobs and salaries. A college friend working on HR told me that they have it worse than people working in sales and IT. I don't know how they keep going but they have my respect for their perseverance.
The reason why I'm curious about this is to give my little sister something to read when before she joins the workforce next year. I want to convince her to choose small to medium companies for her first job, like I did after I quit from my previous company.
I'm now working in a small company who recently created their IT team. The pay is more, permanent WFH, and the people are great. If I started here I wouldn't have anxiety and major trust issues. I'm not undermining the experience I got from working in those top companies, I learned a lot from them but that doesn't justify all the bad things that I got from them. In the end it's just people trying to be in the best situation.