It sounds like you should work four hour weeks or whatever it is you must to satisfy your new employer and ride it out until your retention pay vests, using the copious free time you have to either grow your skill set or otherwise enrich your life.
Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
231–240 of 464 posts
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#232I work in a $VERY_LARGE_COMPANY (over 100,000) and this is how it works. The best way to solve problems are:
1. If you really have to do something with a different team, escalate. If you are not ranking high enough, ask your manager or second up manager to talk to their manager or second up manager. I am in lower management, so I can solve some stuff directly, for some I ask my director to help, once in a while we need a VP to help.
2. If that is not really needed, drop it. But tell your line management that you are dropping it, document it in writing, get their confirmation.
Large companies are all about priorities and focusing only on what is big. If you understand that, use that information properly. In a very small company with very little complexity and overhead you can have great flexibility, not with a huge construction. Ants are agile, elephants not really.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#233A lot of people have talked about the issues with this post, but I wanted to call out one specific thing: The first engineer I talk to doesn't even attempt to answer my question but redirects me to their manager. Ok, that's odd, I think, but whatever. This is definitely not odd. The whole point of managers is that they're there to protect their engineers from getting off track with every random request that comes up.…
> The whole point of managers is that they're there to protect their engineers from getting off track with every random request that comes up. I understand that it may feel bureaucratic, but as an engineer, someone who insists on talking to me directly without going through my manager is always going to mark themselves as someone who doesn't respect my time and doesn't understand that they're not the center of my universe.
Yes. I don't have a manager at the moment, so I have to field these requests myself and my productivity has tanked.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
true, I've done similar in my career. IME your growth potential and earnings potential can peter out when you do this though. YMMV
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#235Work on something else, and launch this change in Q2.
Instead of launching one change fast, switch to doing many changes slowly, and pipeline them so some are always waiting and others are always ready for you to do work.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#236> 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...
Wow, thats a truly excellent comment. Everyone who manages people should read that IMO.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#237Get out. There’s zero chance things will improve in foreseeable future.
Big companies love unfinished projects. As long as the money’s flowing, there’s not much motivation to actually finish and risk a change.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#238Working in a startup is very different from working in a corporation, as you found out. As a single developer, you can not change the big corporation in its ways, how ever wrong they are. I think you have three options:
1) keep trying - and burn out in a few years
2) Adjust to the corporate life style stop caring, make do, and find something else important in your life. A hobby, a side project, something to burn for.
3) Get the fuck out of there, find (or start) another small company where you can feel at home and do meaningful work.
Good luck, what ever you choose!
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#239Sounds like Wells Fargo :grin:
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#240> 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…
If the other team lets you do the work, who's going to review it, explain the codebase to you and, by FAR the most important thing: who's going to maintain it when it breaks? Are you commiting your team and your time to a response when a bug appears with your code or when it needs to be migrated?
That's pretty much the same issue as FOSS maintainers have with random drive-by patches - someone needs to still maintain that stuff in the future and in 99% the original owner fscks off by that time leaving the original team to deal with their artsy hacky creation.