Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 464 posts

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#131

Post by tejohnso »

dogleash wrote: post #21

>Is this how it's like at all large companies? Not all, but a lot. >What should I do? Short term: Mentally check out. Embrace the Zen of just doing what's asked of you. It's not your job to be a go-getter anymore. Half because of institutional complexity/inertia, and half because in a tall organization hierarchy the middle managers don't want anyone below them swimming outside their lane (even if it would be to their…

Exactly. There are environments where individual proactive efficiency is highly rewarded and respected, but not all. Sometimes you just need to settle down into the same flow as others. Trying to swim faster than the current just doesn't pay and can also breed resentment toward those who have mastered the coasting mentality and seem to be doing better off financially and mentally.

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#132

Post by jacobr1 »

altdataseller wrote: post #86
korijn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this, something that helped me accept this change: your acquisition marked the achievement of your startup goal. You're done now, you can now stop living for your work, and start working to live.

I think OP was an employee at a startup got acquired. Which may or may not mean they got a huge financial windfall from it

Then this is the time that the OP needs to join a startup as founder or early employee and get meaningful equity in exchange.

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#133

Post by [deleted] »

dpark wrote: post #80
rpeden wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds about right. I'd also note to the OP that in might help to treat the acquiring company like the Borg: they acquired you , and now it's on you to serve their needs, not necessarily the other way around. If your app isn't quite compatible with their infrastructure, the right move is probably to modify your app, not ask them to modify their infrastructure. That might be annoying, but it's probably also the r…

> If your app isn't quite compatible with their infrastructure, the right move is probably to modify your app, not ask them to modify their infrastructure. This is my thought as well. The claim is that the fix on the infrastructure side should be a few days at most, but also that the infrastructure does not work for the app. If it’s only a few days for an infrastructure change, why is it so untenable to modify the ap…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#134

Post by timdaub »

shadowtree wrote: post #41

Tell me you never ran a large code base in production, without telling me. Past a certain point there are no "simple code changes" anymore. Automation and functional QA needs to ensure zero regressions, internal and external docs need to be considered, it all needs to be bundled in with many other code changes (feature and fixes), etc. There is no shortcut. Even FB had to dial back their "break shit in prod" mantra.…

I dislike your condescending tone and I also think your speech doesn't generalize.

There are large code bases in production that are productive: Everything that is open source - and still the process isn't as shit as op describes.

So this has to do with corporate hierarchies and not the quality of the code.

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#136

Post by ascar »

harmegido wrote: post #50
_skel wrote: post #37

> So I reach out to the manager and ask what is going on. This is a simple task, I said. Why does it take an entire quarter for your team to deliver? He doesn't have an answer. Your simple task, which you think would only take a few days to implement, is probably one request in a long queue of requests that team is dealing with. That means they won't be able to start on it for a long time. That team probably set up t…

It's pretty interesting to contrast OP's experience with this recent /r/bestof that describes in detail why things might be the way you're describing: https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/rkru22/uloosesignif...

Direct link

https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/rkk9qg/im_a_new_s...

for everyone else having a hard time figuring out how to find the actual comment.

Really worth a read and absolutely puts OPs story into perspective.

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#137

Post by shiohime »

I worked at a startup that was acquired by a larger corporation. This echoes my experience as well, everything became so clogged up with processes, documentation, responsibilities so distributed that there were times it became unclear who was responsible for what. I had a bunch of arguments with other departments and upper management over processes that were directly impacting my team of engineers, but eventually just caved in. Meeting glut, passing of responsibilities, nobody stepping up to get stuff done, and a bunch of other things that made me unhappy. They at least treated me well enough all things considered and I had multiple promotions, but eventually I got so burnt out I just left.

I don't think it's necessarily like this at all large companies. I had worked at a much, much, much larger company before and never had to deal with anything like that. It really comes down to the company that acquires the smaller one.

I mean look at Blizzard, who inevitably just became Activision despite years of claiming they would not. The process / culture of the company that acquires the smaller one almost inevitably wins out.

You have to realize that the company you worked for no longer exists. It was acquired and is something else entirely. If you're unhappy, I would suggest to consider looking around for different opportunities.

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#138

Post by bastijn »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #94
_skel wrote: post #37

> So I reach out to the manager and ask what is going on. This is a simple task, I said. Why does it take an entire quarter for your team to deliver? He doesn't have an answer. Your simple task, which you think would only take a few days to implement, is probably one request in a long queue of requests that team is dealing with. That means they won't be able to start on it for a long time. That team probably set up t…

> Take this as a learning experience: don't assume that you are at a startup where people will drop everything to handle a request from you right away. This doesn't explain why they wouldn't accept the offer of work from /u/lopkeny12ko. I've been in the same situation multiple times. Sometimes I've been allowed to do the work and sometimes not. In the cases where I was allowed to do the work, I certainly took longer…

Author mentioned compliance. He likely is an untrained engineer in the eyes of the organization owning the codebase. Working in a medical company I recognize this. You can get write access after you followed all necessary trainings. Part of those are for regulatory reasons, part of those are added by the company to make sure new people don't make a holy mess of a (central) platform codebase. Most of time people coming from outside the platform group can't oversee the impact of their changes. They think of implementing the feature but don't know the history of the codebase, forget to add tests (or add at the wrong place in test pyramid, do not check execution times, etc), requirements, design reviews, FMEA, SW BOM updates in case 3rd party is used, fix quality tool reorted issues, link tests to the requirements, update design documents and portals, communicate breaking changes, if any, etc.

That is assuming the extension is actually desired. If everybody would start adding their little extension to a central platform before too long your platform is gone and instead you end up with a mono-archive that has no clear owner, a variation for every business unit, and so many possible configurations it can no longer be maintained.

Probably it is not that contributions aren't welcome but the author must be trained, given access and the team owning the code must be made available to support. After design discussions the author should implement end2end but likely is not allowed to modify requirements and access some of the other tools to make the updates. So owning team must be made available to do that work. The owning team is likely not paid to smoke cigars with their feet up so Q1 2022 is their proposal. I've seen worse.

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#139

Post by jacobr1 »

zarkov99 wrote: post #125
jonathankoren wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is this how military's organize themselves, or do they just get shi*t done? If you think the military isn't a large government bureaucracy with mountains of paper work, I recommend you talk to a veteran.

It depends. Special Forces team typically cut through a lot of that bullshit. Perhaps there in lies the answer. If you want the resources of a large organization and the freedom of a startup you need to look for the smaller elite teams within the org.

Often called the "Tiger team" in the lingo of corporate jargon.

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#140

Post by lojack »

_skel wrote: post #37

> So I reach out to the manager and ask what is going on. This is a simple task, I said. Why does it take an entire quarter for your team to deliver? He doesn't have an answer. Your simple task, which you think would only take a few days to implement, is probably one request in a long queue of requests that team is dealing with. That means they won't be able to start on it for a long time. That team probably set up t…

> is probably one request in a long queue of requests that team is dealing with

You've explained away the crux of the problem without even identifying it as a problem. Queues are an inappropriate construct for managing work. If something urgent & important takes weeks to even get looked at then there is a prioritization problem. If something that isn't urgent or important even gets worked on at all then there is a commitment problem. Based on what OP has described, the company is likely doing a lot of work they shouldn't be doing and working on things in the wrong order. Similarly, the work OP is doing may be much less important than they think it is.

Now, I agree that it's important to understand how the system works, but IMO it's equally as important to understand how it can be improved. Long lead times is definitely not a good thing, and also not a foregone conclusion at big companies.

Post reply on HN