The Enterprise Experience

Summary

18/08/2025 The Enterprise Experience It's the 18th of August. Today is a special day for me, as it marks my one-year anniversary of working at $ENTERPRISE. Before this I had been a professional software developer for the best part of a decade, but entirely in startups and SMEs. This time last year I made the decision to sell out and hit the big leagues for fun and financial profit. After my interview the only feedback I received was that I didn't have much exposure to enterprise software development, which was completely true. At the time I took this criticism to heart; only later did I realise it was a compliment. In celebration I thought it'd be fun to put some of my observations to paper. They're not so much observations as just unfiltered snark, but I'm enjoying the cathartic feeling of getting it out. If you too work at $ENTERPRISE or its relatives and disagree with anything you've read, congratulations and long may it last. Things that aren't problems in small businesses are suddenly intractable problems in large organisations On those first days of excitement, I opened my first pull request and was promptly greeted with a big red error generated from a tool I had never seen before for something I didn't do. I asked a developer on my team, and the conversation went something like this: "Hey, have you seen this before?" "No - this doesn't make much sense. It seems related to the config of $TOOL. Maybe try talking to whoever manages it." "Can you point me to who that is?" "Sorry, I've no idea." At this point I hadn't realised that finding who is responsible for something in a large organisation is very much not straightforward. What followed was a week and a half of a Teams-based call tree that went precisely nowhere at a snail's pace. By a complete chance I accidentally stumbled over a page in the great forest of Confluence which was from the long ago time when the tool was implemented (two years ago) and owned by a person who had now left (was made redundant)....