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

> Then, all of a sudden, some small startup "cuts corners", doesn't fill out the paperwork, kind of ignores all this "compliance" a bit, and somehow...out-executes you with 1/10th the staff, at half the price.

I'd quibble with your word choice and replace "and somehow..." with "because of this". It's apparent to me that you can work faster and do it cheaper when you're cutting corners, which is where some of the value in startups lie (in addition to the actual innovation).

Acquiring companies do a lot of heavy lifting to ensure compliance in all their markets. As a startup, front end devs could push out a feature in half a day; bur that was in (American) English only, with no review of the copy by Legal, and didn't comply with EU accessibility standards on minimum contrast ratio, nor did they check to see of it works with screen readers. Each of these things could cause legal/regulatory/reputation problems for large companies, but all the former-startup engineer sees is bureaucracy - because they are now working at a scale they are not familiar with.

A startup may ignore colorblind users, with no consequences, but the DMV should not. For large societal problems, MVPs do not cut it.

I've been in this situation (acquisition 2, below). You will eventually move on to another small company.

Acquisition 1: This was a quite insane dotcom acquisition. The VP Marketing loved us and bought us. The VP Engineering hated us, and dumped all our software first chance she got. Oh, by the way, those two VPs were married to each other.

Acquisition 2: Much smoother. I stayed around for a few years, enjoying coasting after the intensity of the startup. I continued to tinker on the product, and add incremental improvements, but the days of innovation were over. I also enjoyed the huge money they threw at us (raises, bonuses) to keep people around. They really needed to do that because interesting work ceased, and the amount of stupid process and politics was off the charts. (Example: they issued us windows laptops. We promptly wiped them and installed Linux. If service was required, we would have to reinstall windows, get the laptop repaired, and then again wipe and install windows.) I eventually left for another startup.

This is pretty typical example of culture change when moving from a small organisation to a large one. The thing that makes this sort of culture change so emotionally challenging is that involves a fairly dramatic change in values. This can lead to a lot of feelings of underappreciation and frustration, which can be overcome only by recognizing that values are not immutable and universal, but are instead highly context dependent.

Massively overgeneralizing of course, we can observe the following tendencies: Small organizations tend to value people who are highly responsive and who can work independently in a fairly unstructured and unconstrained operating environment. They tend to value people who can do "whatever is technically necessary" to rapidly solve problems and move the business forward towards it's goals.

As organizations grow, such forward progress is easily stymied and halted by interruptions and context switches from colleagues, and velocity becomes largely a function of how much such "frictions" can be reduced or eliminated. Behaviours and traits which were highly valued and rewarded in a small-organization context (e.g. highly independent problem solving and proactivity) can, under many circumstances, become liabilities in large organizations if they interfere with the smooth running of established processes, or cause disruption and confusion to large numbers of people. Reliability (and above all predictability) become far more important than responsiveness or (sometimes) raw velocity.

Needless to say, being able to adapt behaviours and attitudes depending on context is an exceedingly useful skill, and just because you were rewarded for acting in a particular way in a small organization does not mean that you will continue to be rewarded for acting in a particular way in a big organization. The two are completely different beasts, and it's the communications structure that drives the shift in values.

twblalock's response in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29641795 is very well and I support that view.

However I want to add an important aspect: The company acquired the company and the deeper they integrate you the more the corporate culture will take over.

If you don't like corporate culture with all it's ups and downs you don't have to have a false sense of loyalty, especially not to the past company. The past company is gone as the owners gave it away.

Thus either accept the change and use the benefits of structure, some saftey and predictability a corporation can give or seek a challenge more to your liking.

I just mean keeping your job, but to the post above, I mean realizing that because there is no inherent virtue in a for-profit job, there is also no "corruption" simply because there's too much bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is typically in service to a functioning large organization being able to remain large and reliably make money; it's fine.

If you want to do some good in the world, it's a lot better to put up with the bureaucracy and instead direct your energy to some worthy local political cause or something. Trying to make your employer a force for good is a poor plan, because as an organization whose goal is profit, it will never be sustainably motivated by the desire to do good.