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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?

#301

Post by jlawer »

treis wrote: post #152
ascar wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Direct link https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/rkk9qg/im_a_new_s... for everyone else having a hard time figuring out how to find the actual comment. Really worth a read and absolutely puts OPs story into perspective.

Yeah that story is total bullshit. It's someone's fantasy. The equivalent of me telling the story of my epic comeback in the Superbowl.

I could see it happening where I work (Large Multinational in the Energy Industry). HR are removed enough that they would back this up, yet have the authority. Teams often report by function, therefore there isn't a local manager worried about the missed deadline. Combined with the companies image as attempting to be a leader in social responsibility (at least as much as an Oil and Gas company can). I can see it happen however I don't think I could see it in any of the smaller companies I have worked for as the results of missing deadline were frequently too significant.

That being said my current employer is exactly like the one mentioned by OP here. You basically need to build credibility internally to deliver.

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

#302

Post by Tade0 »

nocturnial wrote: post #28

You wanted something done, you explained why it should be done, they agreed and will implement it. I would quit that job immediately! I'm not even being sarcastic. If it bothers you that much that people like to plan things and that takes too much time according to you then yes, just quit. I've been on the other end of things where someone said: "Oh, I can implement this in 5 minutes". The first few persons I would h…

> "Oh, I can implement this in 5 minutes"

Close to a decade ago I got into a heated debate with my then boss over a project which was delayed and got served this(just with three months instead of five minutes).

I was fired and sure enough, few months went by and I get a call from the client asking if I could testify against my former boss.

That crazy sonofabitch actually tried to pull this off, but grossly underestimated the project's complexity, to predictable results.

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

#303

Post by nine_zeros »

> 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.

Get this documented and stall your own work. When management asks for status report, point them to this delay by the other team.

Management is paid big bucks to handle resources. If your manager cannot get you the resources by negotiating with another manager, IT IS NOT YOUR PROBLEM.

Welcome to large company politics. Your actual output is not important. Hold your management accountable.

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

#304

Post by fma »

fma wrote: post #289
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…

Oh yeah - I've also been on the other side of the boat. Our big corp company sold off a division...we had a certain amount of time (months...) to split everything off and hand everything over. In some cases we had to rewrite entire applications to work with their xyz software/infrastructure/tech stack, whatever. If we don't meet the deadline, company pays a penalty per day or whatever. In other words - high priority.

We had to realign projects, drop projects, carve out resources. This also means anytime we had any requests as OP is mentioning, we get in front of the line if we mention the magic words.

My point is - if something is important at Big Corp, it gets done. If it's not getting done, it probably isn't as important as you think it is.

Another example is - this recent log4j security vulnerability. You think people sat around waiting for approvals? Hah. Every application had a few days to fix test and deploy. People were called back from vacations. Deployment freezes were magically unfrozen.

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

#305

Post by _tom_ »

kortex wrote: post #295
_tom_ wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you understand modern book marketing. :-)

Wait...are you suggesting that whole comment is actually just an ad ?

While I have no evidence in this particular case, if I wanted to promote a book, I could imagine making up a related, positive story, which just happens to mention the book positively, and posting it on a popular social media site (I put the book in my cart). Then one could follow up with a softball opposing story on another site to get some controversy and thus visibility.

Probably someone will cross link for you (I thought about doing that when I saw the headline). If not, a sock puppet can point out the link, and the book, again.

TBH these two stories have the exaggerated perfection that characterizes fake stories. And the fact that they arrived so close together makes me very suspicious.

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

#306

Post by underwater »

You have a task to do, which you said yourself is simple. Yet you've not been able to complete it. Someone could look at you and say "why hasn't lopkeny12ko completed the migration, I could do it in a couple of days".

Sure, you're blocked by that other team. But they are probably blocked by some other team, or by process put in place by some other function.

You aren't stuck in traffic, you are traffic.

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

#307

Post by throwaway984393 »

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

Pretty much, yes. There are lots of reasons why all that crap that happened to you was necessary, and it's directly a factor of it being a big-ass company. Large systems are inefficient and complex.

> What should I do?

What do you want to do?

Large companies may kill your soul and make you lose all interest in your career, because you are reduced to an ungreased cog in an extremely rickety, rusted, pointless wheel. If you would rather ship cool new stuff quickly, you should quit and go find more engaging work.

But if you have a family and just need to pay the bills, there are much worse things than decades of steady employment. You can also often move laterally throughout the company, play with new technology, or be exposed to new products/services, without having to have actually gotten any real work done. Some people even get side gigs and double up their income. Working in large companies can also teach you more "professional" ways to do work. Working within large orgs is a skill in itself - the problems you describe can often be trivially worked around by building relationships outside your team. Most "restrictions" imposed by "managers" are actually just bullshit politics that you can route around if you learn the reasons for it all.

By the way: if you leave, try to tweak your benefits so that they pay out all the 401K or HSA money at the beginning of the year (front-loading). When you quit you won't have to have waited all year to contribute tax-deferred benefits to your retirement accounts.

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

#308

Post by prirun »

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…

> it needs to get reviewed by legal so it doesn't expose us to legal liability

I'd like to understand this. How does a legal team do a code review that ensures a code change doesn't expose the company to legal liability?

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

#309

Post by rekoros »

Basically, you have two options:

- learn to embrace the dysfunction while resting and vesting. Note that this is easier to do for founders (vs team members)

- avoid the urge to fix the big broken company and quit - there’s lots of interesting work out there these days

Sorry you have to go through this - I think most big companies are on some spectrum of this, but the spread is pretty significant.

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

#310

Post by kronin »

matwood wrote: post #227
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.…

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…

> On other nitpick is that startups live and die with automation by their lean nature. They have fewer resources and must automate everything they can. It's built into startups mindset.

I am at a medium sized company. We acquired a startup. They did not "live and die with automation", instead they contracted out the production operations. A dozen customers, all on snowflake systems which were constantly tweaked directly in prod with no documentation or audit process.

My experience on the acquirer side is that startup engineers like to just build stuff and deploy it. Design? Testing? Documentation? Automation? None of that existed in this company in any fashion. And they are themselves grating against a modicum of process. Please explain what you want to do, why, and provide a high level design. You are going to replace the whole auth system, it's not something you just "figure out" as you go along... Sigh.

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