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

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

#281

Post by cyberpunk »

aahortwwy wrote: post #268

> you told us to migrate to your platform, and it literally does not work for our app You were told to migrate to their platform. They were not told to change their platform to support your app. That the request has come from you, an individual engineer, means that it is going to be prioritized far below a request that has come from, say, their skip level's skip level. You are being told, politely and indirectly, to…

I mean, how much work is it to change to another method of vm provisioning and deployment? Could be a bit, but I mean… that’s what you have to do during an integration… I’d love to know why this is a blocker really, reeks of “my precious hand crafted helm (or the devops magic that makes everything work was written by someone who isn’t around anymore, and it’s too scary to fsck with) needs to be binned and I still attached to it”

Sorry op, you don’t own it anymore.

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

#282

Post by tanjiro »

I have seen this happen many times - the only way to get other teams to prioritize your work is to convince your leaderships its important so they can talk to the leadership of those team that it is important. Sometimes, even after leadership pressure, teams refuse to move priorities or don't deliver on time - always account for those as well.

No matter what you do, the slow pace & politics of large companies will hinder your growth. There would be some features/projects that would be absolutely unfeasible - not because they are technically harder but because you won't be able to reach alignment.

Smarter thing to do in these situations is to move on to something else that can deliver impact. If you keep delivering impactful features on your own (even if it means some duplication of effort), you will notice a lot of other team's manager would be interested in integrating with you as they now think of your feature/product as a potential cash cow & the cycle turn the other way - you product grow way faster than you predicted because now the company is working to enhance it & in doing so, they will bring customers from different touch points the company has resulting in a stronger moat.

Ofc, all this requires patience, vision, strategy, politics & luck. Its different ball game from startup where you throw N things to the wall and expect K things to stick. Here you can only throw maybe N/2 things to the wall and maybe K-x things will stick but if your strategy is correct, those K-x things will be far valuable in a big company.

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

#283

Post by dnissley »

rjzzleep wrote: post #118
_skel wrote: post #37

> 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…

I mean sure there is "some" truth to it. But more likely than not the acquiring company has two conflicting priorities: 1. acquire startups/talent to improve certain things that the company is incompetent at 2. actively block efforts from the startup because a certain part of the company actually believes that they are doing things better themselves, i.e. ego I advised a big US car maker on their autonomy and one par…

The three A's line up perfectly with the options presented in the influential book "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

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

#285

Post by gumby »

You have two choices:

1 - Get a new job (at higher pay) in this hot market

2 - Wait for your remaining equity to vest / meet the acquisition's earn out milestone, then execute option 1.

It's simply a "two cultures" question (look up the book if you care). If you're a startup person, you'll hate big companies. (And good, effective big company people frequently flail when they join a startup). I'm not claiming one is better than they other (there are things one can do that the other cannot, and vice versa).

My gf is a big company person and she tried to get me to switch, but through interviewing it was clear to me that I wouldn't enjoy it, and often clear to the interviewers that I probably wouldn't work out, even when I'd previously done precisely what they were hiring for.

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

#286

Post by ryandrake »

tharne wrote: post #126
fiachamp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The amount of people on HN nowadays that are okay with getting nothing useful done is striking. You're mistaking the role of a mature company. Unlike a startup, in a mature company there are a ton of customers relying on your product and making sure you don't f*k up their business with a mistake or careless change is much more important than building cool new stuff quickly. You don't want your bank "moving fast and…

Exactly. When you're a $1T+ company, nothing "just takes two weeks" to implement. What if your tiny change has an unforeseen side effect that takes down a critical auth system resulting in a revenue loss of $10M/minute. Are you going to take responsibility? What are you going to write in that postmortem? What if your change infringes on someone's patent or causes some other regulatory compliance related issue and the company gets sued? Your $BIG_COMPANY is not putting this change request through ultra-scrutiny just to frustrate you.

First, the team needing to do the work has about 10X as much work waiting in their queue than they can possibly do given their staffing. So your request either has to be more important than the existing work, you need to get a VP to expedite it, or you need to wait. It's not like there's an engineer just sitting there picking his nose browsing Facebook waiting for work. And even if you just yeet them a patch, they will need to set aside engineering time to review that patch, so back of the queue it goes, too.

Second, that work needs to go through (sometimes multiple) code reviews, have unit and integration tests written, and be able to show those test passing more than once, it needs to get reviewed by legal so it doesn't expose us to legal liability, it needs to get reviewed by security so my 9 year old can't use it to get a root shell, it needs to get reviewed by privacy/data protection so we know it's not leaking some user's personal information, it needs to get a systems review so we know it won't disrupt other critical revenue-generating services. I mean, what are you expecting, just type the code in, run a few tests, any yolo it into production?? No way.

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

#287

Post by crossroadsguy »

Having worked at startups for last half a decade this would be my dream place.

> Is this how it's like at all large companies?

No.

> What should I do?

Find another (startup?) job.

Because it doesn’t look like that place will change and I’m pretty sure they have good reasons.

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

#289

Post by fma »

dpark wrote: post #29

> Finally, after many rounds of arguing about why this needs to be done in the first place (ahem: you told us to migrate to your platform, and it literally does not work for our app), they quote us a delivery timeline of end of Q1 in 2022. This is where your manager (and if necessary their manager) needs to get involved. Is this actually important and urgent work? If so, they need to work with this other team’s manag…

Eeeeexacly. Working at a big company is a skill itself. I mean lets face it...we all can code, but can you code in a big company and work around bureaucracy and try to deploy at the speed of a startup (or close to it)? I know people may laugh, but it's a question to ask. For example you can't plan your infrastructure a week before you deploy because you gotta have the infrastructure team approve your requests (which requires architectural and security approval), and you gotta have the allocation for your project in the first place (of course the trick is if you forget you get a resource from an existing parallel project on your team!)

In ops case there is a disconnect. Whenever I had something high priority and I get red tape...there's 2 solutions

1) Escalate escalate escalate. Their manager doesn't help? Their director will. If their director isn't helpful...then sorry it's not really a high priority. I've NEVER had to gone above a director for escalation because the entire org was aligned with what was a priority. You might face a manager trying to protect their team but if their director says jump, they ask how high. Perfect example is a firewall rule takes 2 weeks to open up (security approval, firewall engineer allocation, etc etc). Guess what...I got like 3 open up with 24-48 hour turn around time each (kept getting blocked at different hops) for a high priority project.

2) If you've been around long enough and you have a good track record, you know people on a personal level, you do favors for them...people will do favors for you. You ping them, add a few emojis, reminisce about old times...and an hour later it's done. The other week we had a deploy and we forgot to contact an infrastructure team to let them know they had to promote something in production. Usually your deployment is dead in the water, because a new prod change request needs approval, yada yada. Well, of course there's a deviation for that (In Big Corp. there is ALWAYS a deviation for something). And I know their team lead, their manager and their Project Manager...we were back in business after negotiation what we needed to do to do it 'properly' and not get flagged for an authorized change.

1) Learn the skill of cutting red tape which a lot of times is escalation, planning ahead or being creative. 2) Be nice to people. If you're the new kid on the block and already pissing off people...you're going to get enough red tape to wrap everyone's Christmas presents at the company.

Use your new found knowledge sparingly. You don't want to be the boy that cries wolf.

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

#290

Post by ryandrake »

tanjiro wrote: post #282

I have seen this happen many times - the only way to get other teams to prioritize your work is to convince your leaderships its important so they can talk to the leadership of those team that it is important. Sometimes, even after leadership pressure, teams refuse to move priorities or don't deliver on time - always account for those as well. No matter what you do, the slow pace & politics of large companies will hi…

Yes, yes yes! This is an interview question I (at big tech) like to ask candidates: "You have a very high priority project and need another team's help. You find they already have many "high priority projects" that they are working on. How do you go about getting this help?" A good answer to this question often separates the actual senior engineers from the junior "Senior Software Engineers". Navigating a corporate bureaucracy and influencing across it where you have no managerial control is a skill you have to develop in Big Tech, and when you get good at it, it's a superpower.
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