Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 464 posts

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

#381

Post by piva00 »

prirun wrote: post #308
ryandrake wrote: post #286

Earlier 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?

There is no code review by legal. There is a talk, usually multiple talks, between legal representatives and the engineers + manager delivering something. It's the engineers and manager job to explain what the piece of work will do and help legal understand its implications so they can gather knowledge and come up with their assessment given their skills in Law.

I think you read it too literally, legal will review what is the impact of some changes in compliance and so on but you, as an engineer, is responsible to translate what the code/feature/system is doing to something that legal can understand and reason about, it's part of your job if you are anywhere senior+ level.

I had to interact quite a lot with legal in my past couple of jobs, it wasn't ever an issue because the legal department seemed to be staffed with smart people that would understand what I was telling them, or would ask relevant questions to clarify their understanding, it's a two-way street, not a button to push on the PR to "ask for legal review".

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

#382

Post by piva00 »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #124
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…

It's just different priorities. Startups are busy trying to build a functional house of cards. Established businesses are trying to keep employees from knocking over that functional house of cards.

> Established businesses are trying to keep employees from knocking over that functional house of cards.

And usually also spend the next 10 years cleaning up the total mess of a house of cards from the startup phase into a more manageable and stable house of cards.

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

#383

Post by soonnow »

bobobob420 wrote: post #318
_tom_ wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean I read it and thought about looking up the book and getting it

I did like the book, back when I was completely new to DevOps. It's also a fictional story in the same vein as the one on reddit basically same template, but more mystic. Explaining DevOps through a story.

Now I'd suggest to just read the state of Devops reports by Google, they are excellent.

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

#384

Post by mekkkkkk »

geofft wrote: post #269
mekkkkkk wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean with "securing your place within the system of being successful"? Just keeping your job? Or are you talking about abandoning other goals than monetary success? I'd say that getting a win/win is more than a achievable within the "system". I.e. I get to do something I enjoy doing, while also getting payed for it. The company gets the output of my labor for a reasonable price. Everyone wins and no one i…

I just mean keeping your job, but to the post above, I mean realizing that because there is no inherent virtue in a for-profit job, there is also no "corruption" simply because there's too much bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is typically in service to a functioning large organization being able to remain large and reliably make money; it's fine. If you want to do some good in the world, it's a lot better to put up with…

Or quit and find a workplace with a level of bureaucracy that you are comfortable with. Surely that's an option as well?

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

#385

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

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…

> If anything, it's the established boring companies that are doing something useful (even if that something is not sexy or exciting), while a lot of startups are just burning through someone else's money designing things that no one really wants or needs.

To be honest, SME remain the economic backbone of most modern countries and the size of SME still allow them to operate somewhat effectively. Most large companies are either slowly drifting to irrelevance, surviving on a steady diet of acquisitions from teams who could previously achieve things or milking a business line they established when they were smaller and somewhat nibble. Large companies successfully growing by building what you call important stuff without acquiring are the exception.

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

#386

Post by _3u10 »

_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…

Ahh the lifer life.

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

#388

Post by piva00 »

dpark wrote: post #80
rpeden wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds about right. I'd also note to the OP that in might help to treat the acquiring company like the Borg: they acquired you , and now it's on you to serve their needs, not necessarily the other way around. If your app isn't quite compatible with their infrastructure, the right move is probably to modify your app, not ask them to modify their infrastructure. That might be annoying, but it's probably also the r…

> If your app isn't quite compatible with their infrastructure, the right move is probably to modify your app, not ask them to modify their infrastructure. This is my thought as well. The claim is that the fix on the infrastructure side should be a few days at most, but also that the infrastructure does not work for the app. If it’s only a few days for an infrastructure change, why is it so untenable to modify the ap…

> As an engineer (and manager) who owns infrastructure components, these “little” requests are death by a thousand cuts. They typically aren’t actually little, but even when they are, they forever add additional maintenance cost and complexity.

As a former SRE and tech lead for some OPS teams, I agree.

Sometimes they are actually little but will create divergent states for your code/infrastructure, increasing complexity and cognitive load on the team maintaining infra, slowly but surely.

In my experience with infrastructure on larger organisations it will require, at some point, to standardise practices and processes, and it will be painful for teams that don't fit squarely with the standard. You always aim to embrace 80-90% of the components in the organisation (or at least 80-90% of the most profitable/important ones) and take the hit that 20% will require modifications, as extensive and costly as they might be.

It's always a juggling act, engineers with the mindset of building whatever/however they want will feel less empowered when their favourite set of tools, tools that they might be using for a while, isn't supported by the standard. Some teams will take a lot of the load to adapt to whatever was agreed as a standard, churn will inevitably happen in those teams so it requires a long time deliberating what is acceptable or not. The job is always to strive making everyone as equally unhappy as possible because it's impossible to please everyone.

Those little requests might also have impacts and implications much larger than what the requester thinks about, when your infrastructure system is supporting 200+ teams any change is bound to cause ripple effects so you have to be deliberate.

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

#389

Post by shaan7 »

_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…

Can attest to this. Well not me, talking from experience from a friend. She keeps telling me about engineers from the startup that "they" acquired. Her team is already overloaded by requests from a bunch of other teams that they try their best to prioritize and deliver - it is hard work.

Even after that they get comments like OP "This is a simple change, why will it take a week?", "I can just finish this in few hours and submit a patch". I guess it takes a while for people to learn that writing code is only 5% of the effort, the rest of it is review, testing, QA, E2E, compliance and what not. There sometimes is unnecessary bureaucracy as well, but that doesn't mean that the actual engineering processes are useless.

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

#390

Post by piva00 »

sokoloff wrote: post #312
pavel_lishin wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This doesn't explain why they wouldn't accept the offer of work from /u/lopkeny12ko. I know of at least two teams who would kindly ask me to refrain from doing this; me doing the work doesn't mean they don't have to do any. They still have to take the time to review my code, provide feedback, possibly explain to me their standards and conventions. Afterward, they have to maintain and own my changes - what if I intr…

Heaven forbid someone introduce a popular feature into an internal tool. I do know the concern here, but it seems to miss the forest for the leaves on the trees.

Are you going to assume ownership of that change if it breaks in production at any point and the team needs to provide support? Because I surely don't like owning pieces of critical code that wasn't implemented/explicitly maintained by my team, doing code archeology while putting out fires caused by 3rd parties' code is in the not-so-much-fun category of work.
Post reply on HN