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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?

#451

Post by ethbr0 »

bostik wrote: post #361
ethbr0 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no compliance reason why OP couldn't have read access to look at the source. If there is a compliance issue with someone looking at source, then either (a) their source control is misconfigured, (b) their source control is being misused, or (c) they have no policy to guarantee appropriate use and detect improper use. Any organization that uses compliance as an excuse for opaqueness, creating silos, and guard…

> * There is no compliance reason why OP couldn't have read access to look at the source.* At a guess, I would say you have never worked with DRM integration. Getting access even to the binary SDK's can take months, and if you ever need the special license to work with the thing on source code level, prepare for a delay of several quarters. Long time ago, Nokia was integrating Microsoft's DRM. I got to witness first…

My closest experience was working with SDK of CCTV system. Which, after six months of waiting for legal, ended up being the ugliest and most obtuse codebase I've ever seen.

Thankfully, it was an optional side project at work, so I was able to step away and make more progress elsewhere.

But it also substantially reinforced my opinion that... if you need to keep a codebase secret... it's probably not a good thing.

And yes, I realize it is sadly endemic in the embedded world, for reasons both good (firmware secrets) and bad (artificial moats and controlling integration and compatibility).

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

#453

Post by ameliaquining »

9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #433
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

odd that most in this thread think this story is fiction, some even suggest it might be a marketing ploy to peddle a book. Is really the whole world like this or is there a difference depending on jurisdiction (e.g. comments reflect values of US?). While I can't prove a negative, this story is highly plausible in Europe where legal/HR will be on your ass and even fire the CEO if it turns out they had knowledge. In 20…

Reddit in particular is infected by this kind of toxic thinking. One on the one had, I think individuals hate being fooled, and so there’s a rush to decry any remarkable or interesting anecdotes as “bullshit”. In this case in particular, I suspect the disbelievers are stuck in soul-sucking jobs they hate, and one way they cope with that is by truly believing that everyone else in the world is in a similar situation.…

An argument that it's plausible that almost all remarkable or interesting anecdotes that you read on Reddit are fake: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/12/might-people-on-the-in...

I'm not sure if I believe this, and I certainly don't think it has much to do with the existence of r/thathappened (which does indeed seem much more rooted in people's fear of having been a sucker). But it's interesting to think that the basic intuition of "true stories are more common than fake ones" might be misleading with respect to Reddit in particular, because of the specifics of how Reddit works.

(The point about it being harmless is unpersuasive to me; I want to believe that a given story is true if and only if it is actually true.)

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

#454

Post by mbrodersen »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #449
mbrodersen wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX seems to do just fine?

do you work there? would be interesting to hear how you believe it's different and why. if not, then I think "just fine" is probably conjecture, and I'd imagine they have the same problems as everyone else at scale.

SpaceX clearly has no problems innovating and moving forward fast. Something you don’t see in more bureaucratic organisations. I saw an interview with astronauts who has worked for both NASA and SpaceX and they said that the big difference was that what would take a year for NASA took a day for SpaceX.

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

#455

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#456

Post by nnurmanov »

I worked and work with large corporations. It takes years to implement things, be patient:) I started thinking that people who work at corporations believe in reincarnation. If a feature is not implemented in this life it will for sure be implemented in their next life.

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

#457

Post by washadjeffmad »

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…

Working backwards from your label, what signs leading up to Facebook's recent outages could we have used to evaluate them as being or not being a "mature company"?

I think, perhaps, that being siloed, bureaucratic, large, profitable, and management heavy are not the best or only qualifiers of "maturity".

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

#458

Post by achillesheels »

rossdavidh wrote: post #392
achillesheels wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

The honest answer to your question, is that the military usually operates like the original post describes, but in wartime or other very special cases there is super high priority and you just get s&*t done. The startup's app is probably not, to the larger corporation, a particularly high priority, so it is happening in a way much like the military does most things in peacetime, i.e. a lot of bureaucracy and politics…

“To secure the peace, one must prepare for war.”
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