This is honestly why so many of the large megatech company products are slowly grinding themselves into feature decay, automated and algorithmic decision making with very little human oversight, and just so much away from what people expect of tech "innovation" companies. Every day the tech industry is looking like the old Ma Bells and bloated companies that ask so much and deliver so little but keep us all so captive.
Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
221–230 of 464 posts
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#222Some people thrive in a process-oriented engineering culture. I don't, and it seems you don't either. Be true to yourself: find other work. When an interviewer asks, "why did you leave", answer "I learn more and do better work in smaller organizations," or even "that big-company stuff is not for me."
It's an important step in the development of your career to understand this about yourself. And, you've been lucky to learn it relatively painlessly by going through this acquisition.
When you go to work at this place, put on your anthropologist hat. Observe what you see happening, and observe your reactions. By all means talk to your supervisors and colleagues about it. But don't gripe, learn. Think like a visitor to a strange land.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah that story is total bullshit. It's someone's fantasy. The equivalent of me telling the story of my epic comeback in the Superbowl.
I can buy the part about putting up fences between business people at the tech team. Been there, done that, modernized project management. But the "thank you"s, bonuses and all that? Complete fantasy. :)
I 100% guarantee it's someone who has recently read "The Phoenix Project" and made it up based on that.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#224Enjoy working in a sclerotic bureaucracy where you will never be held accountable for failing to deliver much because some other team is blocking you, giving you plenty of free time to practice Leetcode or whatever, wait for your earnout period to elapse, and then jump to a new company.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#225Completely agree with what everyone else has said about working at a large company, and how past a certain point your changes are not just your changes - they affect the organization as a whole.
The good news is, you can fix it diplomatically (I used to see red, too, when I got stonewalled like this).
The magic words are “risk” and “escalate”. If your project will be at risk, you bring it up to your direct manager and PM and ask him to escalate the issue. Once a request goes up and comes back down, I find there is usually extra motivation and bandwidth on another team to help with the issue. And if it doesn’t get escalated? Well, then, that work might not be important enough to address at this moment, which means there are higher priorities. So, ask your manager for other work since you’re blocked on this one piece.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#226>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…
"Care enough, but no more."
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#227Tell 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.…
There is a large gradient between 'fucking around in production' and crippling big corporate process. Maybe the big tech companies all have the perfect amount of process, but much of the process and ceremony at other big companies I've seen is simply in place to keep the lowest common developer employed. Heck, people complain about excessive process on this very site all the time.
On other nitpick is that startups live and die with automation by their lean nature. They have fewer resources and must automate everything they can. It's built into startups mindset.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#228Yep, you are screwed and fighting assimilation is futile. I'm currently at startup that was acquired by a fortune 50 and they are actually allowing us to stay separate and they aren't mucking about with us. All of my previous jobs where I stayed on after the acquisition (3) were all soul crushing. Abandon ship.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#229> 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…
> Queues are an inappropriate construct for managing work.
I disagree. A queue is used to assign priority to a project. When there is more work than people to do the work, you need to prioritize and triage. Just because there is a queue doesn't mean that you can't handle urgent work. You can move it to the head of a queue.
Usually what accompanies a queue is a ticketing system. Nobody like these, but when the organization reaches a certain size, you need this. Tickets are good because it forces the requesting party to put down in writing what they want. This is a necessary step to ensure that right work is done, and it leaves and audit trail, for future people to see what decisions were made and what work was done.
I've worked in an organization where we used a stack based method. In that case the most important thing was the last request. This isn't a good way to work, because it's hard/impossible to maintain focus.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#230Earlier 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.
Or having worked on a platform team - you still need resources to at the very least review the change.
And it is on you and not these folks if something breaks in production.