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

I work at a startup with ~50 employees (and have always worked at startups). Love the work and the people. Recently we were acquired by $LARGE_CORPORATION and the experience has been a living hell for all of us. Things that should take a few days take a few weeks. Things that should take a few weeks take a few quarters. It's slowly driving me insane.

The experience is best shared as a story.

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.

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.

Manager says sure, just fill out this feature request doc. It's a Google Docs template with 4 (!) pages of required documentation to just explain why I want this feature implemented. It asks for my team name, the motivation, why I can't solve the problem some other way, yada yada...ok, I guess it's good to document your work, so sure. I fill it out and submit it.

No response after two days. Then I get an automated email that their skip level manager has approved the work. Huh? This is followed by an email that the team's eng manager approved the work. Why do two layers of management need to approve work on something they have no knowledge about?

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), they quote us a delivery timeline of end of Q1 in 2022.

At this point I am in absolute shock. This should take no more than a few days to implement.

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.

I tell him I'm happy to fix the issue myself, if they link me to the relevant codebase. "It shouldn't be too hard to dig in and submit a patch," I think to myself. He says he cannot give me access to the codebase for compliance reasons, and that only members of his team have R/W on that repo. What???

This is insane. And this entire time I was only alllowed to interact with managers and have not spoken to a single engineer about the actual technical details. It is impossible to get anything done here now.

Is this how it's like at all large companies? What should I do?

The middle managers need to manage their serfdoms and prove their value. It seems like the less value someone actually adds, the more territorial they are-- typically blaming arbitrary "established processes" or something of the same nature. For non-tech companies it seems like burecracy starts to become an issue at like $500mm/yr. Any academia or government org will be the same. You can't really fight the system and win, so it is easiest to just find another job.

This happened to me too.

Small company, very fast paced, learned new tech very quickly for two years and actually pumped out awesome products (in addition to other small company perks).

After the acquisition, the way we worked completely changed for the worse. I ended up leaving and so did about 50% of the developers.

Promotions became much more difficult to achieve, raises were below or only matched inflation, and pretty much every aspect of work became more bureaucratic. This was exactly why I had left my previous company, and I ended up leaving this one as well after giving it a shot. Stagnating my career was not worth it especially in a hot job market.

This kind of thing is more or less how large companies work. These specifics sound pretty bad, but inability to do work that isn't on the roadmap and a roadmap that's written in stone once a year (maybe twice if you're lucky) is very common. The way to be able to get things done is to reduce dependencies on other groups, especially other groups that are impossible to work with; but that might not fit with corporate policies.

If your retention compensation is good, try to learn to accept it and just keep getting things done, even though it takes longer and you can't get as many things done, until the retention runs out or you can't take it anymore or whatever. If the compensation isn't good, then it's time to look for something else.

One of my coworkers left rather than be part of an acquired team. He had been acquired before and wasn't willing to deal with it again.

They won’t care. Their job isn’t to worry about employee satisfaction. They’re more worried about going public or getting acquired.