That sucks.
What's your equity like? Is it worth >100k? Is it >1m?
Unless you have significant equity in your work there's no reason to care so much. It's work.
Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
271–280 of 464 posts
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#272Leave
Do not do things that you hate, they will break you and diminish your passion for your work.
Better use your creative energy elsewhere.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#273Kick back, enjoy the ride and always have a list of reasons that are not tied directly to you for why your assigned project is delayed.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#274As others have pointed out, the software department is overbooked. And acquiring companies always underestimate the cost to clean up and integrate the software of the acquired company.
Try to get yourself transferred into the silo'd department if possible. You're not going to change corporate life. If you can stand corporate life, you might as well move into the most valued department that you can get into. If you can't stand corporate life, well, your options are the same either way. But you can use the transfer as a way to evaluate and update your skills.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#275There is always a ramp up time when joining a large co, get your requests in as soon as possible, after 6 months of project planning and logging requests with other teams that you rely on you can get a flow going.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#276> 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…
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…
Given that the entire tech industry is built on making money with tools and services that are not useful to the society, it's only fair their employees take the mantra and apply it to their professional sphere of influence.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#277Those 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…
Agree 100%. However, the manager of the other group should get some management training. He did a piss poor job at communicating. All it would've taken is explaining the group's prioritization and roadmap and the OP would've not left with "THIS COMPANY CAN'T DO SHIT!" feeling. Now, if they don't have a roadmap, and their prioritization sucks, that's another matter, and entirely possible, of course.
We see the matter from the OP's perspective only, who knows what he was told.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#278You should change your app to match their infra instead of changing their infra. Why can’t you?
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#279As a graybeard who's gone through this a few times, here's my advice: start looking for another job that suits you better. This isn't as situation you can "fix."
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#280This is completely normal. As companies grow larger, systems grow more complex. There are more moving parts serving more users, so for any given change you are more likely to encounter unexpected problems and those problems will take longer to fix and present more financial risk to the company.
If it weren't for this sort of diseconomy of scale, there wouldn't be any small companies; large companies would control everything.