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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?

#91

Post by geofft »

Here is a blunt question: Why do you care about being able to migrate your apps before the end of Q1 2022?

Is your management expecting you to do it faster? Then you need to put your management in touch with the managers you're talking to.

Do you think your own longevity at the company / bonus / performance review will be impacted? Then you need to talk to your management and make them aware of what's going on and that you have gone above and beyond to try to make this work but are still hitting a brick wall.

Do you have nothing else to do at work and you're stuck? Then find something - either by talking to your management, again, or by asking around.

Do you just want to feel the pride of a job well done in making some company's VM deployments slightly more compliant with policies set by people you clearly already dislike for good reason? Then take a step back because you've spent too much of your life living for this startup and not for yourself.

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

#92

Post by softwaredoug »

You just simply escalate to whoever is asking you to the parent company's platform. And lay out the consequences of it not happening - it's as simple as that.

When your manager asks "why isn't this done yet" you document what you've said here, and say you're blocked. Any sane manager would escalate and see why it isn't done. If it truly is a company priority, it'll get unblocked. If it's not a company priority, it'll continue to be blocked, and you'll work on something else.

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

#93

Post by korijn »

achillesheels wrote: post #70
fileeditview wrote: post #34

I 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…

Quoted post unavailable.

Let's see you solve 50 tickets each worth a couple days in a couple days.

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

#94

Post by CogitoCogito »

_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…

> Take this as a learning experience: don't assume that you are at a startup where people will drop everything to handle a request from you right away.

This doesn't explain why they wouldn't accept the offer of work from /u/lopkeny12ko. I've been in the same situation multiple times. Sometimes I've been allowed to do the work and sometimes not. In the cases where I was allowed to do the work, I certainly took longer than they would have taken, but the work was complete much earlier (months) than they would have done it, the quality was just as high, and the other group didn't really have to put effort into it. It was actually a win-win for everyone and resulted in products actually shipping on time. On the other hand, the organizations that didn't allow this were all basically operational disasters. This sort of thing was just one red flag of many.

I'd recommend /u/lopkeny12ko to either stop caring and just put in minimal effort or find somewhere new to work. It doesn't sound to me like they're taking advantage of your skills.

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

#95

Post by bink »

dogleash wrote: post #21

>Is this how it's like at all large companies? Not all, but a lot. >What should I do? Short term: Mentally check out. Embrace the Zen of just doing what's asked of you. It's not your job to be a go-getter anymore. Half because of institutional complexity/inertia, and half because in a tall organization hierarchy the middle managers don't want anyone below them swimming outside their lane (even if it would be to their…

Completely agree. I would add, though, that there is no reason not to recommend improvements if you can think of them. You don't have to just accept that things take forever, are broken, and everyone hates life. It's not all that rare to find a good manager even at a big Org that wants to help improve things where they can. But if they reject your suggestions then the Zen approach is by far the best.

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

#96

Post by matwood »

korijn wrote: post #33
dogleash wrote: post #21

>Is this how it's like at all large companies? Not all, but a lot. >What should I do? Short term: Mentally check out. Embrace the Zen of just doing what's asked of you. It's not your job to be a go-getter anymore. Half because of institutional complexity/inertia, and half because in a tall organization hierarchy the middle managers don't want anyone below them swimming outside their lane (even if it would be to their…

To add to this, something that helped me accept this change: your acquisition marked the achievement of your startup goal. You're done now, you can now stop living for your work, and start working to live.

Bingo. I've been through a similar situation, and what helped was realizing I 'won'. Unfortunately not a unicorn type win, but a win nonetheless. Relax, recharge, and then look for the next opportunity.

I think a lot the advice in this thread about navigating large company politics is missing the point a bit. I've heard entrepreneurs and people who like to work at start ups describe they don't do so because they necessarily like to, but because they have to. They are either bad at, or can't/refuse to deal with large company politics so head in a different direction.

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

#97

Post by renewiltord »

Many large companies are like this. Personally, I find it very frustrating. At one place I worked that was acquired, the teams decided to silo themselves off (no outside patches) with SOC2 or something or the other determined to be the reason. There were many parts of the system that I knew better than the teams themselves and I didn't have the commit bit. It was a nightmare and through lots of work I managed to get commit. It was successful for a bit but ultimately I was expending a lot of social capital and even if I took on full ownership for maintenance and delivered on it, the standards people hold for their own team are usually lower than what they hold for someone like that.

I left to go on to other things. The company was successful without me and I was eventually successful without them. I would have been unhappy there and they would have been overpaying me for what I provided considering their constraints.

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

#98

Post by icedchai »

This is normal. You need to fill out all that stuff because the other team has a huge backlog of work. They could probably do it in a couple of days if they had nothing else to do.

Absolute shock? Q1/2022 isn't that far away in "big company" terms. It's probably easier to keep running your app the way you're doing now anyway, so what's the big deal?

Don't worry about it and move on.

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

#99

Post by fiachamp »

_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…

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.

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

#100

Post by theshrike79 »

> I'm working on migrating our apps to the parent company's VM launching and deploy platform. Should be fairly straightforward, I think. Unfortunately, the deploy tooling isn't entirely compatible with our app so I ask the team if they can implement $X feature to support our app.

That's your problem right there. That VM launching platform is most likely supporting dozens of other applications. They team handling it want to be doubleplussure that your request won't break any of the other applications.

And there are at least 42 "quick two hour tasks" in the queue before you.

As others have said already: you have two choices. 1) Embrace the zen of working inside a bureaucracy 2) Find a new fast-moving startup to work in.

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