Good Careers at Bad Companies
Shared Physics
A blog by Roman Kudryashov
Good Careers at Bad Companies
Published on May 31, 2026 |<br>17 min read | |
How To Business
Someone once asked me whether you can join a dysfunctional company and still have a good career.<br>The question assumed dysfunction is rare—something you'd see in advance and choose to join or avoid. But my experience is that most companies are dysfunctional in some significant and non-immediately obvious way, so a better question is: how do you build a meaningful career when those kinds of companies are the norm, not the exception?<br>There are, broadly speaking, two types of companies:<br>Companies that are going somewhere (or have gotten somewhere) and<br>Companies that are going nowhere (or are slipping back to nowhere)<br>The trajectory of a company is important because it correlates with that company's impact on your career.<br>Companies that have gotten somewhere are the BigCo/FAANGs (or your industry equivalents) – brand names with good salaries and a reputation halo for your resume. Companies that are going somewhere are the ones you read about in the news – a small set of rockets with fast growth and fawning coverage. Both of these types of companies give your resume (and career) a pedigree and an opportunity to work alongside some of the top talent or top operational structures in an industry. They also offer great paychecks that compensate for whatever issues may be present.<br>These companies can end up massive (tens to hundreds of thousands of employees) but they make up a small subset of all employment. There are fewer of them around – not everyone is the number one in their industry, or on track to be.<br>That means most companies are those that are going nowhere or those that are going back to nowhere. Because trajectory, management, and quality of operations are strongly correlated, zero or negative growth1 typically signals that something is wrong or broken at a company, and it isn't being fixed. There's some disconnect in the feedback loop between performance and accountability. These companies are not at the top of their game and the toughest challenges you'll encounter at them are navigating the dysfunction without becoming jaded or burning out.<br>That's what makes them, in common parlance, "bad companies".<br>Most people work for these kinds of companies, or will work for a company like this at some point in their career. And most companies I have worked with, in that regard, have been "bad" companies.2<br>To flip Tolstoy's wisdom, great companies are all contextually unique and idiosyncratic outliers, while bad companies are bad in mostly similar ways. Because of those similarities, there are takeaways from working at bad companies that are broadly useful and applicable to any company you work at.<br>The arc of working at a bad company looks like this:<br>You arrive optimistically – things seem nice from the outside!<br>You notice the dysfunction.<br>You try to fix things.<br>You learn the limitations of what you can do and/or how intractable the problems are.<br>You realize that a meaningful, successful tenure here will mean something different.<br>You build skills, extract experiences, and build relationships.<br>You move on. There's little reason to stay once you've learned 80% of what is available to be learned or practiced. If you stay, you will stagnate.<br>So can you build a good career in such an environment?<br>Yes, but not in the same way that you'd do it at an exceptional company. The two things you are certain to take away from a bad company are (1) your personal reputation and (2) the experience, knowledge, and confidence in dealing with dysfunction and messiness. To be clear, those are valuable takeaways.<br>And so career growth at a bad company comes from learning to survive, navigate, and then solve mostly human-caused problems without burning out.<br>In many ways, that is also your career arc: with survival comes learning; with learning comes experimentation, experience, and growth; and eventually you'll find yourself both in the position of being able to make an impact and having the skills and wherewithal to do so.<br>But mostly, you first have to survive.<br>(Practice Not Dying)<br>Avoid Stepping on Rakes<br>Being right is often extremely context-specific while being wrong is often pretty universal.3 So learning what the universal mistakes look like and subsequently avoiding them has been more effective for me than trying to be overly clever, innovative, and correct.<br>Being clever, innovative, and correct is especially tough early on in your career because you likely lack the experience to distinguish between superficial similarities and significant differences (and vice versa) between situations. What passes for early-career innovation is often a rediscovery of existing techniques, principles, and observations, that when presented as novel insights is read by the rest of the room as inexperience. (Especially if the insights are incomplete – that's been me, in many...