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

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

#161

Post by achillesheels »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #84
achillesheels wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

The explanation given above is that you aren't the priority you used to be.. it doesn't take a month to get something done, it takes a month to do all the things in the queue in front of you. If there is a lesson here it might be that companies quickly lose focus and try to do too many things. Then there are giant queues of things to do and important things are held up by unimportant things. Your thing might be impor…

The judgment, however, is that while one is not the same priority any longer, one's priorities are necessarily devalued, due to the a competition for resources, namely, time. I see the common explanation here is to just shrug at the state of affairs. Is this the best management can do? I can see why Fortune 500 companies die now.

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

#164

Post by fknorangesite »

lojack wrote: post #140
_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 co…

> If something urgent & important

Who said OP's task was particularly urgent or important? Maybe it's getting pushed down the list because they don't have a prioritization problem. We don't know - all we have is OP's (limited) perspective.

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

#165

Post by jimjimjim »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #104
fiachamp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of people on HN nowadays that are okay with getting nothing useful done is striking. Startup guy, you don't have to accept being part of a bloated hierarchy that rewards politics more than good decision-making. You could check out at the corpo job and start prototyping your own startup ideas. Or join another early stage startup where your performance matters. I'll be starting one soon - let's keep in touch…

if your startup ever makes it to any sort of scale, it will likely have the same problems -- they all do :)

exactly this. once you have paying customers you don't want them to grow to hate you and look for an alternative.

So don't break stuff. If you are google or aws then fine do what you want. There will always be another customer along soon.

but YOU are not google or aws.

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

#166

Post by kk6mrp »

_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…

> I know for sure that it's possible to be highly productive at a large company with a lot of bureaucracy -- but I also know for sure that new employees who try to bypass process and question the priorities of other teams, before they learn the ropes and build credibility and trust with other people, do not succeed.

This is 100% correct. It takes time to find the people who can help you get things done and also time to build relationships with them. As others have mentioned, jobs (depending on the job of course) that one person can handle easily in a small company may take the coordination of multiple departments at a large company. For this reason you have to take the time to grow these relationships with those around you and in other departments. With time you'll find friends that will gladly help you accomplish the task you are looking to do!

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

#168

Post by roflulz »

dools wrote: post #147
dllthomas wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very grown up sport, more like running a country than building a house We need to stop calling things "grown up" when what we mean is that they take a different set of skills. It's childish, and I think it's been causing harm in our industry.

So it’s okay to refer to something as childish but not as grown up?

so much irony

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

#169

Post by Joeri »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #127
CogitoCogito wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> This doesn't explain why they wouldn't accept the offer of work from /u/lopkeny12ko. I know of at least two teams who would kindly ask me to refrain from doing this; me doing the work doesn't mean they don't have to do any. They still have to take the time to review my code, provide feedback, possibly explain to me their standards and conventions. Afterward, they have to maintain and own my changes - what if I intr…

Setting up teams for inner source work can be done and tends to earn itself back, but most teams aren’t set up for this. Typical solutions for the issues you mention: trusted committers to review and merge work without having that role burden the whole team, contribution guidelines to set standards, 30 day warranty to avoid getting code dumped in their lap that’s broken but also avoid having too many owners of parts of the codebase.

Anyway, I would recommend going to the inner source commons website and reading a few of the success stories like paypal’s.

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