Reminds me of a multinational where I had to "purchase" infrastructure from the team in the next workspace to deploy our new application. Literally all the paperwork and requirement gathering you'd expect from getting external providers/contracts, run through an internal system with all sorts of forms and people being brought "in the loop", yet the infra team was literally a few desks over... '
Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
31–40 of 464 posts
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#32[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#33>Is this how it's like at all large companies? Not all, but a lot. >What should I do? Short term: Mentally check out. Embrace the Zen of just doing what's asked of you. It's not your job to be a go-getter anymore. Half because of institutional complexity/inertia, and half because in a tall organization hierarchy the middle managers don't want anyone below them swimming outside their lane (even if it would be to their…
To add to this, something that helped me accept this change: your acquisition marked the achievement of your startup goal. You're done now, you can now stop living for your work, and start working to live.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#34I understand your frustration because I work in a large company and stuff can take forever. And this is the case for 99.9% of large companies.
However one thing you should consider is this: there are probably 50 other people like you demanding to just have feature xy implemented. They are all totally simple etc.. until you have seen a large enterprise code base with lots of legacy cruft. Test suites that take hours to run..
And then the team has to fix bugs that also pile up. Every fix makes the code base uglier.
And then people come along and want direct access to your repository to "help".
You see where I am going?
Long story short: it's not as simple as you think it is. If it really bothers you that much and you cannot understand "the other side", you should probably find another startup to work at. And I am not snarky.. this is my honest recommendation.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#35"The Trial" by Kafka.
Corporate BS is quite enough to turn one into a cynic within a year. Its the daily lying and gaslighting I think.
I have an allergy to the environment.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#36>a living hell for all of us Put all these grievances to paper, have every worker sign it, and submit it to every member of the board of directors.
What will this accomplish?
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#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 the onerous Google Docs process to gate requests because they get so many!
When they do start working on your request, maybe it will only take a few days -- or maybe you underestimate the level of effort required because you are new to the company and you don't understand the complexity of the systems you are dealing with.
Take this as a learning experience: don't assume that you are at a startup where people will drop everything to handle a request from you right away. Instead, assume that people are dealing with a lot of other requests, from a lot of other people. Learn how the system works, and learn how to be effective within that system.
I know for sure that it's possible to be highly productive at a large company with a lot of bureaucracy -- 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.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#38Those 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…
I was an ops manager at $big_company like the one described; your response gets it pretty right. There were many many groups that all wanted a slice of our team's time, and it added up to probably a 6 month lead time on all requests. Bringing in skip levels was almost necessary as we sometimes had to have upper management fight over who wants their subordinates' tasks done first. We didn't care who's tasks got done first, we just needed to know what the enterprise's priorities were. It wasn't uncommon for these tasks to have to snake through multiple groups for a couple weeks so that they can each give their input on what should be prioritized before it even hit our backlog.
If their parent company is publicly traded, giving access to the codebase is a huge SOX no-no.
All of these gripes are just big company issues. I suspect OP is a better fit for smaller, non-public companies.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#39> Recently we were acquired by $LARGE_CORPORATION
You didn't mention retention bonuses, so: start looking for another job. Your old job is gone.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#40Try to play the game, maximise material benefit and spend enough time there to get another nice line in your resume, if indeed the name of this company carry some credibility. If you also got a lot of free time bring your own laptop or connect out to some virtual machine and work on your own idea or projects, nobody is going to care as long as you do your job. Then at some stage switch company or start your own, it is a blessing in disguise, your anxiety derives from too much ego, you felt important before and now you are not, don't let it blind you from the benefit you can derive from this situation.