I (23M) am currently living in a South East Asian country and working in a medium-sized company (with about 60-80 employees) as a Design Engineer, where the work is mostly not stressful and the upper managements are tolerant, and the pay is decent (can't be said high but also not low) for someone with 1-2 years of engineering experience. So far I'm ok with everything that I have to do in this job, although sometimes I need to take the “wear-many-hats” role, but this actually gives me lots of experiences and I end up having nice things to write in my resume. The upper management in this company was generous enough to put my employment status into permanent after only 3 months of Contract-based work.
My dad (currently in his 50s) keeps telling me to move to big companies (either multinational or well-known state-owned). He is an engineer with different engineering specialty than mine, thus different experience.
His points for suggesting me to move to big companies are:
1. Better pay (agree with this one)
2. Better connection (also agree with this one)
3. Opportunities to work abroad in developed countries (also agree with this one)
4. More fair treatment of employees (debatable, not always agree)
5. More learning opportunities (debatable, not always agree, I might just be another 'cog in the wheel' in big companies)
Does any of you can relate with my situation ? I don't know whether it's because my dad is kinda out-of-touch with my engineering field (he always works in the mining industry while I always get jobs in manufacturing industry), or maybe he is someone who is not aware of “changes in workplace trends and cultures”.
I am not someone who is too faithful of medium or smaller companies either, it's just, I kinda cringe hearing my dad always exaggerate about “how nice everything will be” if I work in big companies. I also observe that people in my country around my age range are quite ok with moving from big companies to small or medium sized companies, maybe because big companies are no longer as good as they were once portrayed in the past ?