Short answer to your question is: yes. As a general rule, as the corporation gets larger, the work becomes more process-oriented, until it reaches a point where the process is the work.
Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
251–260 of 464 posts
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#252Try be nice and friendly to these peple who are giving you grief, see if you can explain the issues you're having and ask them if there is something more you can do to help expedite the process.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Learn how the system works, and learn how to be effective within that system. And what if the system is corrupt? Do you advocate complacency? > 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. And what if the people who do not succeed with such bureaucracy ar…
Literally the point of a job at a for-profit company is to make money, yes, primarily for yourself and secondarily for the business. This is by no means moral or virtuous. But it is true , and because it is true, the people who admit the truth of it will be more successful in the sense that they will be working with the system, and the people who act as if it is somehow untrue and there is some greater virtue behind…
What do you mean with "securing your place within the system of being successful"? Just keeping your job? Or are you talking about abandoning other goals than monetary success? I'd say that getting a win/win is more than a achievable within the "system". I.e. I get to do something I enjoy doing, while also getting payed for it. The company gets the output of my labor for a reasonable price. Everyone wins and no one is sacrificing anything.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#254End of Q1 2022 for a significant feature sounds reasonable for a large company (a few days to implement means a few weeks once you include design, documentation, review, implement, test, deploy).
It's annoying, but everything takes longer in a big company because every change you make can affect many teams/customers, and it's very hard to get unscheduled project work done quickly unless it's a real emergency.
Your best response is to make porting your apps to their platform dependent on that change, so you can't do it before end of 2022Q1, escalate the dependency to your manager so he/she can either elevate the priority of the feature you need, or just live with the timeline.
It's annoying for sure, I work at a growing company that used to be a small startup and am often dismayed at how long it takes to do even trivial changes, but am also reminded of the time that we accidentally caused a full outage for all of our customers with a config change that was deployed everywhere before we discovered a problem. We didn't bake it fully in the QA system (where we would have discovered the problem) because everyone "knew" it was a harmless change similar to others that we make all the time. We esentially applied it to QA to verify the syntax, then rolled it out globally, where it ran fine for a few days before filling up some temp space. So now it takes at least 2 weeks to roll out those "simple" changes due to mandatory documentation and testing.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. :)
Why? Maybe it’s that you’ve never worked for a boss that fought that hard for your free time? Great bosses like this exist
The manager maybe, but you don't change the culture of the company like that. A low level manager has very little influence on that, they'd be replaced the moment other VPs started complaining.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get where you are coming from, but even if you don't get huge financial windfall, there is just no point in sacrificing yourself anymore. It's not going to make as big of a difference anymore.
If you don't get a huge financial windfall, there was never a point in sacrificing yourself.
And the truth comes out.
Unless you're employee ~3, you're probably not going to make a huge financial windfall. The only counterexample I've seen was from an employee who invested in startups themselves. (Apparently he even "investment sniped" one that later became a YC co, which I found pretty impressive.) Suffice to say, he knew how to play the game.
I think lots of people work at startups because they like to work. There's nothing wrong with that. But don't be too surprised at the end of it when you walk with a total comp of less than you'd have made at $bigco. People work at $bigco for the money because it sucks -- that' why it pays $bigcash -- and OP's story shows the kind of pain you're avoiding by taking a pay cut.
OP, I wish you all the best. If this is your first experience with a big company, well... Just know that it's far worse at big banks. :) You're lucky in that sense.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think OP was an employee at a startup got acquired. Which may or may not mean they got a huge financial windfall from it
Then this is the time that the OP needs to join a startup as founder or early employee and get meaningful equity in exchange.
You mean in 5 years when they have saved up a nest egg using that stupid big company money and stock options that are actually worth something.
When you win the lotto you don't toss away the ticket so you can play again. Even if OP didn't cash out founder style - they still get essentially a multi-year paid vacation.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#258Tell 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 li…
Try to think about the other side of this. Do you want to be standing in line at the grocery store and have your debit card just not work at all because Visa aquired this dudes startup and he didn't understand that feature X wasn't implemented because it would swamp the 10 megabit VPN link between Visa and your credit union?
It isn't about keeping the lowest common developer employed, it is about keeping the lowest common developer from bricking the entire system. Unless of course you can tell me where to find enough developers of your skill level to write all the code required to run a modern society.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Completely agree. I knew they'd link to the Phoenix Project at the end
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#260Sound about right. Another option is to see if you can get approval to stay on your current infrastructure, and maybe get your codebase and environments up to the required standards. Reduce your dependency on the large company, reduce your headaches, this will be the first of many. If the product works it works.