r/antiwork
Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
51–60 of 464 posts
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#52What you describe is a quite normal way to do it. It is not like they do not care about your task or too protective about their code base. It is that you are just one of the many stakeholders they have to deal with and they very likely have a huge backlog that does require prioritization. Apparently, your task is not a top priority one.
Besides, they may have a certain delivery process with quality assurance that was designed for their scale, which prevents them from a real quick fix. Deviating from this process usually does not worth it - one small exception will become a rule once noticed by others.
Leaving the company for that reason is an extreme. Adapting to this pace may make things more comfortable. So you were told to migrate your app to their platform, but you have a dependency and cannot proceed before infra team resolves your ticket. Just describe the problem to your manager and take the next task from your backlog. It is as simple as that. Maybe your manager will discuss priorities again with infra team and they will do it faster. Maybe it is not that important to migrate and you can work on some new feature instead - you will know about it soon.
The one thing that you really need to know about big corps is that the world is not circling around you and your needs. There is usually a lot of hidden complexity in the organization, that you do not see and may even never discover. This is why building good relationships with your peers is important: you can call it politics, but what really matters is that you should trust in the decisions of your peers and make sure that your process is good and your interfaces with other teams are transparent enough.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#53Large companies spend more time on coordination, risk management and the mythical “alignment” than smaller companies, who spend more time doing. If done right, this creates economies of scale, as well as the predictability that Wall Street asks for.
But… To thrive you have to focus on a lot of less fun things. And excellence at the expense of the things listed above isn’t valued.
If you love the small company work environment more than your specific product, then you should consider an exit. If the value of your golden handcuffs is too high, then play along.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#54At large companies, I've always been in the habit of expecting one thing I need per quarter. That means that if I need something this quarter, I put it on the other team's roadmap for next quarter, and then do my integration the quarter after that. (My experience was an organization where OKRs were the root of all planning. If you are working with teams that do bug triage / prioritization / sprint planning every two weeks, then obviously the latency can be decreased. But quarters seem like an artificial boundary that people love for whatever reason.)
This sounds terrible, but it worked pretty well for larger things. I was a TL and was in the habit of meeting with my internal customers before quarterly planning, to make sure that we could add their requests to our todos for that quarter, and then make sure we always executed on them. (We did do the things we promised, so people could make accurate plans. I remember many quarters of people sounding mildly shocked that we did stuff they asked for, but after a track record of execution, we got trust without any pushback like "can you do that right now instead of next quarter?")
Obviously, this doesn't help you very much if you want to get your thing done today and move on to your next task. Your product and your integration is going to look like the org structure that your company has. If you need deep integration with the product but are a separate team, well, I've simply never seen that work. The teams need to be much closer together in the org for that to happen.
Edit: oh, I'll add one other thing. Once planning starts to work, you can kind of dial up or dial back how quickly you want to react to one-off tasks or special requests. For example, if your team has a track record of completing 100 story points worth of work per sprint, you could only take on 80 story points and use that capacity for special requests. Planning sounds like a drag, but the discipline is actually very useful.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#55So, the cost to the company becoming large is that politics exist. There are too many stakeholders and they want to pull things in different directions and you have to be politically savvy in order to balance between them.
This is not everyone's vibe and it is why a lot of Open Source software does better with a benevolent dictator than with a democratic process. For instance it's the reason that I don't contribute to Wikipedia.
Once you realize that you're particular situation is a political problem the solution becomes obvious. You stop working on the “required upgrade”, citing that you are blocked on this other team. If possible, track your onboarding feature in the big company's issue tracker, and link the two bugs as blockers. The political side is, if somebody actually needed you doing this VM migration work, they need to escalate to this other team. Or, they need to give you a big juicy high-profile project to refactor your code, to not do whatever it was.. and this gives you plenty of space to also do all sorts of other things that you never get to budget refactoring time for. Your call whether you like the game once you know how to play, or whether you nope out like I did with Wikipedia.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#56>What should I do?
You should take a moment, and try to understand the other side of your request.
Read this response from /r/antiwork, it's about a new manager having to get his team to understand work life balance: https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/rkk9qg/im_a_new_s...
Also, this issue goes beyond you. If you need something done, with a different org, that is now on your boss to figure out how to get that done, not you.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#57Is there any value in you learning how to effectively work in a place where things take weeks instead of days? If not, that's okay. Though do appreciate that as that 50 person company scales, it too will need to take a longer time to align all the moving pieces.
Moving slow isn't inherently bad, it just might not be.. your thing.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#58Echoing others who have gone through the startup -> $LARGE_CORPORATION acquisition, and having been there myself: just leave. It won't get better. On the contrary, it'll get worse as those worth their salt see the writing on the wall and head for greener pastures. Before you know it, all the people you love working with will have moved on, you'll be the only one fighting for progress, and worst of all, the burden of responsibility will fall increasingly on your shoulders as one of the remaining few with domain knowledge.
Consider it mission accomplished, startup acquired, check the box, journey over, on to the next one. The market for software developers is on fire right now. You'll have no problem finding a new startup to join, and you'll be instantly relieved.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#59> 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…
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…
And with acquisition you are likely a very small fish in a big pond, whatever used to be high priority in a company of 50 is probably more of a mild annoyance at a company of 5-10k people.
Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
#60Vest and walk. Congrats