I worked at a BigCo after a bunch of small ones, and got totally stressed about the friction as well. Took me a couple years away from the experience to realize that slow processes can be a great thing in their own right because it gives you a lot of time to think about your own interests in and outside of coding.
Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
11–20 of 219 posts
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#12That is exactly what Big means in this context: something indistinguishable from bureaucracy. I am sorry for you but if you want to be able to work “freely” and “get things done”, a big corporation is the worst place to work in. I am not happy to bring bad tidings. Edit: no business gets “Big” without a good paper trail and this implies that no action is performed unless some previous paper work has been carried out.
Yeah, It's a good learning experience at least. Never worked at one of these. Guess I naively assumed that since it was from #SiliconValley it might be different. What do you think would be the best types of jobs to target for lower friction? Startups I guess.
Ask yourself the bigger question; what do you want out of life? Do you want to grind code for 80 hours a week and deal with 24/7 on-call rotations? Or do you want to put in your 40 hours, collect your RSUs, and live happily ever after? There is more to life than work, and #BigCos make it far easier to enjoy that.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#13Part of the difficulty you're dealing with is just learning how a new system works. There are reasons for this friction, you really dont want your inhouse CA to mess up and issue an invalid cert, you want to make sure that each of your several thousand VMs are running the correct up-to-date OS and are on the correct hardware. Once you've learned how to negotiate the new environment a lot of this "friction" will be less painful.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#14Part of the beauty of BigCo is you are being paid to deal with the inefficiency. You have two options sit back, rest and vest or try and streamline things (often a political rather than technical endeavor).
Both can be lucrative journeys.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#15Warning: personal rant first, maybe helpful point of view at the end:
rantish story
I work at a BIG Co (think 700k+ global employees) and we work for other Big(ish) Co as more or less data & code wrangling consultants.
How did I end here? I worked for a small(ish) agency with around 500 people. We moved fast, we build cool stuff, we already to worked for the Big Companies and Banks in our market (Germany). We were at a point were quite a few more formal processes would have been necessary to put into place to fulfill compliance regulations of different markets (think banking or automotive - these require a lot of stuff in terms of compliance from their vendors).
But we got lucky (?) and bought because BIG Co was not able to build their own agency - so they bought a lot of agencies to build a new one.
In the "good ol' days" I knew whom to ask to get anything done. There was an official process and the ones in the know knew how to navigate the short cut. Ask the right person, receive special treatment and be on your way flying fast.
OK - it made the process longer for the lowlies who didn't know the right people. And that is exactly the problem. There already was a two class society of workers. Because we already were too big for "no process" and too small for BIG Co process (and that drags us down nowadays). But the people following the process unbeknown to them got blocked by us knowing the shortcut.
So yeah - it feels shitty and slow and probably as if someone wants to gauge ones eyeballs out with a hot branding iron.
maybe helpful POV
But think of it like this:
Try to transport a 20 foot container on a high power speed boat. The speed boat will be way faster, more agile, more flexible. But if a somewhat bigger wave appears it will crash. And it will also not be able to deliver that much impact (containers) as the big ship once it arrives in the harbor.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#16Perhaps not all BigCos are the same? Mine is by no means a startup but stuff like internal SSL certs and similar are mostly self-service and instantaneous. On the other hand if you wanted to delete an unused parameter on a revenue-impacting code path you'd be in for a fun couple of quarters.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#17Welcome to the real world. We don't have cookies, they were cut as a part of a cost saving package signed by the corporate.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#18Yes. It even happens at medium sized companies.
One answer is to accept the way things are at BigCo and to just coast along in your role, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
Another answer is to work at an early-stage startup or a small non-tech company where you can move fast. The tradeoff there is lack of job security and lesser pay.
Don't ever expect to move fast at BigCo. It's a BigCo for a reason. By moving fast, you could upset the cash cow, hence the friction placed in front of you. But this can work in your favor. Excellence will not be expected of you at BigCo, and if anyone complains about why nothing is getting done, you just repeat exactly why. As long as the company is making money and you haven't made any enemies, the chances of you getting fired are slim to none.
IMO, you have to look at the big picture. If you ignore the friction factor, is life at BigCo so bad? Are your hours reasonable? Do you like your coworkers? Good pay? Learning to let go your frustration with how you think the company should be run may be the most favorable choice. Remember, all jobs suck, more or less. A year after you change companies, you will find things to hate about that one as well.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, It's a good learning experience at least. Never worked at one of these. Guess I naively assumed that since it was from #SiliconValley it might be different. What do you think would be the best types of jobs to target for lower friction? Startups I guess.
A smaller company (not incorporated?), also. I guess a good indicator is the size of the legal Dpt. But I work at academia so I am not your best counselor on the topic. Notice also that you are going to learn A LOT about “due process” and “due diligence”. This will be very useful in your future positions.
Size of Internal Audit team and spend on internal and external audit services is probably a better indicator than size of legal department. In most orgs the legal department mostly serves as a bridge between executives and outside council with minimal emphasis on internal compliance. IA departments on the other hand frequently own responsibility for implementation and enforcement of controls recommended by outside council, as well as controls imposed by non-voluntary regulatory frameworks like SOX and voluntary regulatory/risk control frameworks. The latter are generally the cause of a lot of the 'friction' folks are complaining about here.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#20> Anyone else dealt with this?
I imagine that the majority of white collar workers are employed by large corporations, and so the majority have to deal with this.
Given the number of startup layoffs happening, I imagine a lot of people will be having their first experience with large corporate bureaucracy.
> To get anything done is emotionally exhausting.
Onboarding as a new hire is usually the most frustrating period, because you need to request a lot of things and can't get any work done in the meantime. Eventually you have enough access that you can at least do work while waiting on other requests.
One thing that helps is knowing how to use the corporate tracking system to know which individual specifically the request is stuck on, and then relentlessly following up with that individual via email until they approve your request.
You should also track your tasks and identify the ones that are stalled because you're waiting on a request, and then regularly show the list to your manager (along with your follow up efforts). That way you have a solid reason for not getting those tasks completed.