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

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 unit's benefit and they can take every ounce of credit).

You'll notice that many people in this thread explaining why you shouldn't expect this or that from other teams. And they're not wrong, but none of them are acknowledging or explaining why those reasons weren't automatically communicated in your conversation with those teams. You're not only not seen as a problem solver anymore, you're also too low on the totem pole to be owed an explanation.

So follow the official processes to adapt their system to your product, and your product to their system. Keep your management in the loop about the time cost of both options, it's their problem to fix, not yours. Pour your mental energy into something outside work.

Long term: Decide if you like being checked out or want a new job.

Know that annoying executive who likes to come to the development team and ask them for work? That's what the OP is doing. And how he then loudly laments that he will have to follow some process to have his request added to a backlog, before, at some opportune time in the future, it can be considered and possibly scheduled for being implemented? Yup, OP again.

We hate it when process hits us, but you'd hate it even more if there was none.

Almost certainly not. This requires actual malice on the part of the manager in question. The manager in question doesn’t have any direct authority over OP (unless OP is really bad at storytelling) so would have to go way out of their way to hurt OPs career. Much more likely, the manager doesn’t care about OP at all, because why would they?

But yeah, unless OP is waiting on piles of stock to vest, move on. But because they are unhappy, not because of this random manager.

It’s almost as if layoffs are common after acquisitions and correlation is not causation.

This is where your manager (and if necessary their manager) needs to get involved. Is this actually important and urgent work? If so, they need to work with this other team’s management to get this done. If not, it can wait.

What you’re describing sounds like a particularly dysfunctional and bureaucratic corporation, but dealing with politics like this (and that’s exactly what this is) is part of being in a large company. Cynical people will say that everyone is just trying to protect their fiefdom, but most people are just trying to do the most important work.

That team you’re asking for work probably has hundreds of feature requests every quarter. The process is intended to protect the engineers from being randomized constantly by low value requests. But yeah, the trade off, especially if taken to extremes like this, is that it can slow collaboration to a crawl.