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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?

#291

Post by throwaway19937 »

gorbachev wrote: post #74
seattle_spring wrote: post #10

Those 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.

> 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.

My impression of the OP is that he expects other teams to drop everything and make the change. He may have been told about the roadmap but feel that his project is more important. That seems more likely than the following excerpt from the post.

> 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.

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

#293

Post by lmeyerov »

mike_d wrote: post #258
matwood wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

consider $bigco making $10B year

that's $20K/minute

chances are, $shiny_acquisition isn't making $20K/minute, and woe is the helpful IT responder who kills the golden goose. it'd be crazy if anyone can do that, so many layers of bureaucracy & compliance have evolved to prevent that.

The solution is generally (a) do work not involving production (b) work where production isn't like that, which is generally smaller companies or a surprisingly small number of ~tech companies. Digital Transformation (cloud, PaaS, ...) often involves trying to enable self-serve at enterprise-scale, but I generally still see roadblocks when GPUs, TLS, DNS, SaaS, etc, get involved.

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

#294

Post by conductr »

_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…

Also, know that as an acquired company and requests you submit are lower priority that the core company workload.

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

#296

Post by LilBytes »

TameAntelope wrote: post #205
shadowtree wrote: post #41

Tell 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.…

You're presenting one way of running, "a large code base in production" as if it's the only way. It's not. The other way is to deploy frequently, accept some amount of bugginess, and build your systems to deal with it appropriately. Running and maintaining a large code base is not the huge technical challenge it once was, but unfortunately the relics of the past remain, and force everyone to do things their way, lest…

Maybe they are frequently deploying to prod, but those pipelines are being used by other processes and commits.

There's a big differece between committing small changes to an existing service or infrastructure base frequently, and conversely a PR or feature request from left field from a recent acquire.

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

#297

Post by garmaine »

mike_d wrote: post #257
jacobr1 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really doubt he saw a large compensation increase with the acquisition.

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

#298

Post by Cederfjard »

chomp wrote: post #262
Cederfjard wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If their parent company is publicly traded, giving access to the codebase is a huge SOX no-no. Could you please elaborate on this?

Sure. So while Sarbanes Oxley doesn’t contain anything like “thou shalt not commit to a repo”, it’s pretty clear about separation of duties. This means that the person who commits code cannot be the same as the person who deploys (or has access to deploy) the code. There’s many ways to implement separation of duties that are all valid, but the compliance industry has settled on the concept of least privilege as a fra…

Very interesting, thank you. I’m not based in the US, so was unaware of these regulatory requirements. I can certainly see how it increases friction, as you say.

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

#299

Post by imwillofficial »

ryandrake wrote: post #286
tharne wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

A fantastic and experienced reply. OP, please listen to this

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

#300

Post by PeterisP »

jensensbutton wrote: post #75

> ahem: you told us to migrate to your platform _Someone_ at $LARGE_CORPORATION told you to migrate, but clearly this team didn't. They have no idea who you are, what you're working on, what your timelines are, what the priority of this work is relative to other things happening at the company, or whether there's other things you can be doing in the meantime. Yet they actually did some diligence, got it approved (aft…

Also, changing the app itself is an option. The $LARGE_CORPORATION infrastructure works for other apps, if it doesn't work for the acquired app, it's not a given that the infra must add features but perhaps rather the app should be restructured according to $LARGE_CORPORATION habits. Sure, it will take work, but if according to OP the alternative is to wait a full quarter, then changing the app might be possible in that time.
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