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Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
341–350 of 464 posts
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#342Tell 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.…
For those on the other side, who inherit startup code and have to fold it in ... the hatred is mutual.
Yeah, I was wondering what this might sound like to the other side, perhaps something like:
"Yeah, hi, I just got here last week, I'm here to inject innovation into your life. So your battle tested deployment pipelines that deploy all the code that pays both of our paychecks (because my stuff is pre-revenue, naturally), they don't support the idiosyncratic workflow I literally made up myself. Can you drop everything and jump on this instead?"
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can buy the part about putting up fences between business people at the tech team. Been there, done that, modernized project management. But the "thank you"s, bonuses and all that? Complete fantasy. :)
Why? I do this stuff all the time as a manager. It really goes exactly that way. Notice that the reddit commenter started with getting buy-in from the higher-up in their org. He didn't unilaterally start changing process. This is honestly basic management technique. It is called the "Auntie/Uncle" problem.
I’m having a bit of trouble what “Auntie/Uncle problem” is in reference to. My Google search are just a bit too generic to narrow in. Any chance you know of an article on the subject I can read through?
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can buy the part about putting up fences between business people at the tech team. Been there, done that, modernized project management. But the "thank you"s, bonuses and all that? Complete fantasy. :)
Why? I do this stuff all the time as a manager. It really goes exactly that way. Notice that the reddit commenter started with getting buy-in from the higher-up in their org. He didn't unilaterally start changing process. This is honestly basic management technique. It is called the "Auntie/Uncle" problem.
You might consider providing a link, since Google returns absolutely nothing about management relating to “Auntie / Uncle” as a search term.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Our legal team has to review parts of our application to ensure we were in compliance with certain government programs such as ITAR and EAR. They don't do code level review but they do review business processes, UI's and messaging to make sure we're in compliance.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Maybe it’s that you’ve never worked for a boss that fought that hard for your free time? Great bosses like this exist
The manager maybe, but you don't change the culture of the company like that. A low level manager has very little influence on that, they'd be replaced the moment other VPs started complaining.
Depends on the on the exact political arrangements. I’ve seen a “low” level manager get the ear of a senior leader and get protection/empowerment that ended them to do something on par with this. It sounds like the author got the appropriate buy in, and I suspect that not all ad hoc work got prioritized in a FILO manner.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#347Nice real-life example to demonstrate those who blindly conclude that "government is inefficient and private companies are efficient" without the full context are generally wrong.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#348A lot of people have talked about the issues with this post, but I wanted to call out one specific thing: The first engineer I talk to doesn't even attempt to answer my question but redirects me to their manager. Ok, that's odd, I think, but whatever. This is definitely not odd. The whole point of managers is that they're there to protect their engineers from getting off track with every random request that comes up.…
> This feels like a rant that comes from someone who doesn't have a lot of experience deploying and maintaining complex systems over long periods of time. Agree. Also: > 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) If migrating the app to the new platform is a priority, why not escal…
> Looks like the startup was poorly run, with no clear escalation paths, and employees unaware that such mechanisms exist in companies (and find it odd when they notice another engineer do it).
Might be appropriate for a startup?
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#349Earlier 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.
It's pretty hard to imagine HR intervening in business operations to protect a single department's work-life balance - couldn't really track it from there.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#350I 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 t…
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> So the honest recommendation is to accept it takes >1 month to get something done in an orderly fashion when it can take days?
No, the honest recommendation was based on the included explanation of why it can't take days.