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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?

#211

Post by carabiner »

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.…

You guys complain about things taking quarters to complete. In other industries like aerospace, small changes take years.

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

#212

Post by ncmncm »

The solution to this, as to so many work problems is: move on.

I promise they will get along fine without you, you will get along fine without them, and new adventures are in store.

If the new posting doesn't work out, after a few months, it is a problem with the posting, not with you or with moving on. Move on. Nobody will think ill of you for it.

Almost all my career mistakes were not moving on when I should have. You don't owe them anything, and you cannot prove anything to them. Somebody else will be better equipped to appreciate your contribution than they are.

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

#213

Post by [deleted] »

cm2012 wrote: post #199
tyre wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This doesn't explain why they wouldn't accept the offer of work from /u/lopkeny12ko. I believe the manager explains it right after that. They have compliance reasons that not just anyone can access this codebase. It's also possible that the manager has acquiesced to types of requests before and it was a mess — new engineer doesn't understand they system, requirements of its scale (note that this is a new engineer f…

The real reason is that the manager doesn't care at all, and it takes a lot less effort to say no than yes.

[deleted]

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

#214

Post by toast0 »

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 :)

And when it reaches that stage, the OP can nope out to another up and coming startup. There's no reason someone needs to stay at a company through its whole lifecycle.

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

#215

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

Many years ago, during the dot com crash, so not exactly by choice, I went from a startup to a government department.

I found it utterly soul destroying at first, but it was one of the best things to ever happen to me. I learned how to operate in a large organisation on much bigger and more impactful things.

It is very slow, and you may find that it really isn't for you, but I'd advise you to give it a go. There's a lot of good advice in this thread.

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

#216

Post by endymi0n »

rjzzleep wrote: post #118
_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 mean sure there is "some" truth to it. But more likely than not the acquiring company has two conflicting priorities: 1. acquire startups/talent to improve certain things that the company is incompetent at 2. actively block efforts from the startup because a certain part of the company actually believes that they are doing things better themselves, i.e. ego I advised a big US car maker on their autonomy and one par…

...or commonly phrased by my ex manager when I loudly complained about something as "love it, change it or leave it".

It was a hard truth to swallow, but rationalizing it, I quickly realized all other reactions to adversity are pretty pointless indeed.

There are people who thrive in large orgs and then there's others... eventually I realized there's simply no way I'll ever make peace with bureaucracy.

I can stand brilliant chaos and long, hard hours among talented people better than being a smart cog in the wheel who effectively does 50% of a 9-5 gaming the system and playing solitaire otherwise.

Everybody needs to choose their poison.

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

#217

Post by pavon »

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…

External blockers can be a frustration if they are blocking what you want to get done, but they can be blessing if they are blocking work you don't care about. So you can't move to the corporate VM for at least a quarter. Great! More time to do more interesting work instead!

Keep your corporate integrations on the periphery so you can develop, test and ideally deploy the core code without dependencies on other departments. I mean this in both the code-architecture and org-chart senses. Accept that those integrations will move at the speed of bureaucracy, don't put them in the critical path, and continue to enjoy developing the core.

If this isn't possible, then move on.

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

#218

Post by Cederfjard »

chomp wrote: post #38
seattle_spring wrote: post #10

Those feature request intakes occur because otherwise infra teams become bombarded with multiple requests per day. In isolation they're not much work, but the cumulative requests could take years and truly need prioritization. Being a recently acquisition, I recommend scheduling time with their manager to talk directly about your situation and trying to get on as part of their primary priorities. If that doesn't work…

I was an ops manager at $big_company like the one described; your response gets it pretty right. There were many many groups that all wanted a slice of our team's time, and it added up to probably a 6 month lead time on all requests. Bringing in skip levels was almost necessary as we sometimes had to have upper management fight over who wants their subordinates' tasks done first. We didn't care who's tasks got done f…

> If their parent company is publicly traded, giving access to the codebase is a huge SOX no-no.

Could you please elaborate on this?

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

#219

Post by bcrosby95 »

bps4484 wrote: post #146
nocturnial wrote: post #28

You wanted something done, you explained why it should be done, they agreed and will implement it. I would quit that job immediately! I'm not even being sarcastic. If it bothers you that much that people like to plan things and that takes too much time according to you then yes, just quit. I've been on the other end of things where someone said: "Oh, I can implement this in 5 minutes". The first few persons I would h…

My response to "Oh, I can implement this in 5 minutes" is always "but will you support it?" I think this is the hardest thing about moving from a startup to a more mature company (either through growth and age or acquisition); you have to move your mindset from building to supporting. Building is fun and creative, supporting can be tedious and soul sucking (but needed!). It's a huge, and legitimate, reason why large…

I've only ever worked at small companies, but have a few friends that work at larger ones.

And I always bust up laughing reading their stories about trying to avoid adding even more code under their support umbrella. One person wrote a useful tool for fun, it got passed around and all of a sudden an unrelated team from halfway around the world started asking him for features.

It's definitely a mindset I'm not used to.

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

#220

Post by hardtke »

dpark wrote: post #29

> Finally, after many rounds of arguing about why this needs to be done in the first place (ahem: you told us to migrate to your platform, and it literally does not work for our app), they quote us a delivery timeline of end of Q1 in 2022. 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 manag…

If you need it now to do your job, one strategy companies use is to escalate the request to the common point of reporting (even if it is the CEO). You and the person you are in conflict with (the other manager) need to write an escalation doc describing the conflict. It won't get to the CEO as there will be increasing levels of embarrassment up the report chain. If it does hit the point of common reporting and she says end of Q1 2022 you've got to accept her decision
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