Remember when you used to ask your Mom / Dad, "Why?" and they'd respond with, "Because I said so." It's like that, but subtly more infuriating because it's never a single identifiable person saying "no" that could be spoken to, understood, and reasoned with. The answer that you'll get at a big company is, "because that's the way it is".
No, that's not the way it works at big companies like AWS, Google, Microsoft (source: me, I've worked at all 3). A large company attracts various types of people. It's not homogeneous like what you describe. Also, there are plenty of opportunities to practice "intrapreneurship" within a large company with lots of resources to impact the world in a positive way.
Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?
121–130 of 168 posts
Re: Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?
#122Here is what it means to work at a big company: * Things work slowly, so relax. There are many people that have a hand in every aspect of a product decision. * At a startup you are actively changing the world. That’s done now. Put that completely out of your head. You are cog in a machine. Instead focus on your assigned product, help your teammates, and just learn to relax. * You, the individual, are not important. T…
Re: Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?
#123Here is what it means to work at a big company: * Things work slowly, so relax. There are many people that have a hand in every aspect of a product decision. * At a startup you are actively changing the world. That’s done now. Put that completely out of your head. You are cog in a machine. Instead focus on your assigned product, help your teammates, and just learn to relax. * You, the individual, are not important. T…
Some counter experiences, just based on my own annecdata. > * You, the individual, are not important. The product is important, the department that delivers the product is less important, the teams that comprise the department are less important than that, and so on. Again, accept the reality and just relax. Working at startups I have never felt less important as an individual. The product is #1 and I only exist as a…
I think this is because instead of giving a pay raise, they offer these benefits.
It costs the company nothing.
Re: Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously. I heard big companies were slow before but I didn’t realize the magnitude of it until I joined one. Most people where I work either only produce real work for anywhere between 40 to 10% of their time. The rest is either filled by busywork or twiddling your thumbs (depending on individuals)
Or meetings, meetings, and... more meetings! My 2 cents: As a contractor, charge a lot. They either have budget and want to spend it RIGHT NOW or they don't. The manager engaging you doesn't really care about your daily rate (relatively speaking). Above comments on automation is spot on. Test suites might be terrible, so the care required to make changes without breaking things is your responsibility, hence the slow…
Re: Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?
#125Here is what it means to work at a big company: * Things work slowly, so relax. There are many people that have a hand in every aspect of a product decision. * At a startup you are actively changing the world. That’s done now. Put that completely out of your head. You are cog in a machine. Instead focus on your assigned product, help your teammates, and just learn to relax. * You, the individual, are not important. T…
Why would I find it depressing if I’m risk averse? You sound like the only risk is getting fired for a random reason, which could also happen at a smaller corp.
Re: Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?
#126Here is what it means to work at a big company: * Things work slowly, so relax. There are many people that have a hand in every aspect of a product decision. * At a startup you are actively changing the world. That’s done now. Put that completely out of your head. You are cog in a machine. Instead focus on your assigned product, help your teammates, and just learn to relax. * You, the individual, are not important. T…
> At a startup you are actively changing the world. That sounds very exciting. Can you point to one startup that's changing the world?
All of the big cos right now that have changed the world were a startup not long ago. Yes, not all of the startups will succeed, but there will be yet another trillion dollar company some day which is today somewhere in the realm of early stage startups.
Re: Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?
#127Culture. The fact that it doesn't matter what the company says their culture is and that their culture is defined by the behaviors that they do and don't allow in the workplace. Culture can vary from team to team and department to department.
Deadweight. The organization is going to be full of dead weight.
Get ready to feel under-appreciated and under-valued.
Re: Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?
#128Remember when you used to ask your Mom / Dad, "Why?" and they'd respond with, "Because I said so." It's like that, but subtly more infuriating because it's never a single identifiable person saying "no" that could be spoken to, understood, and reasoned with. The answer that you'll get at a big company is, "because that's the way it is".
Having worked at Big Co and then on my own company for years, this is exactly what I was thinking. You'll lose professional autonomy in exchange for a good salary, job security, and resume bling. And you probably won't have to work as hard or as often (again, probably).
At $bigco, it was possible to beg/borrow for 100k to solve some problem, or hack together some tooling to solve a problem the team was running into. Need some servers and licenses, and it's near year end, partner with a program manager who hasn't used all his budget, help solve their problems, and get things done. I ended up spending something like $250k before the VP was even aware of the side project, and when it got to the VP level, it was how do we spend more to fix the gaps and have proper resources so it's not some toy side project. It was that way anyways, up until $bigco decided to emulate the way it thought the FAANG companies worked, and the management their started trying to micro-manage everyone in a large culture shift.
At mid-size growth company, getting things done was still available, but you sort of had to tiptoe around decisions or solutions Co-Founder/CTO or employee number 10 had a personal interest in or battle it out on particularly poor tech decisions. Most progress was made in areas that the team didn't have an interest or expertise in (IE security), but it was ultimately possible to make progress.
And in startup life, probably the least autonomy of all. The engineering manual literally says you only should work on what you've been assigned, as doing anything else creates chaos. Implying, you don't want to be a chaos maker in the eyes of your employer do you? So it's more difficult than anywhere else I've worked to tiptoe around these emotional investments, have any level of autonomy, and move the product forward.
Anyways, I think my overall message is, companies are far too varied to have any idea on what to expect from moving from startup to $bigco. There might be some general trends, but the environment varies so much, you're not guaranteed to see any general trends when making the switch. All that can really be said, is it will be different, and you may have to jump a few times to really see any of the generalizations apply to you.
Note: Using throwaway account to avoid any blowback.
Re: Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?
#129There's actually a lot that's the same. If you were hired by a large tech company, they think you can do your main thing (write code, think through product strategy, whatever) well. Most of how you do that thing doesn't change.
You're still working with people. People everywhere are more-or-less the same. Some bosses do a good job encouraging debate/disagreement, some less so, but that's true both at large companies and start-ups.
There's a lot of pressure that comes with working at a startup where a release determines whether the company will continue to have money, something you don't have to worry about as much in a large company. But life in a large company is often capital constrained in a similar way. In a large company, the set of pressures is different (keeping costs down in order to be more profitable, as opposed to being limited by what check VCs wrote), but you still have some budget you're working against, timelines, and the possibility of your team being defunded.
At a big company, you have to distinguish between where your team is in the product lifecycle. Some teams are developing new products. Working for these teams feels a lot like working at a start-up, and comes with many similar challenges. It does have some other challenges - you have pre-defined standards for what it means for something to be ready for launch, but you also have a larger network to draw from in order to get you there.
For established products at a large company, the tolerance for risk is much lower. Other commenters have said "well, you're just a cog in the machine now," but this risk tolerance indicates the opposite: your one-line code change or that feature you designed can make life better for thousands of people, or it can make life a nightmare. There's a lot of individual responsibility that comes with that.
At a large company, be prepared to spend longer thinking through your ideas and defending them to others. This comes with trade-offs: you are forced to think through your ideas, making them clearer and better along the way (good), but also may spend less time on that then writing code (bad).
At least at the large company I work for, I've found the standards are much more consistent. I spent the first 8.5 years of my career defending/recommending/arguing for the use of unit tests (of course, being pragmatic with it, when it's helpful, and all the other caveats that ought to come with that). I have not had that debate in 4 years - engineers here understand why we need unit tests (and code reviews, design reviews, coding standards, linters, automated builds...). I think this has a lot to do with the culture and one group of employees learning the lessons from a previous group, but for whatever reason it might be it does make life easier to take certain standards for granted.
At a large company, the access to experts is pretty amazing. If you don't know how to do something - how to fix an issue with your service, how to get started in new technology, conduct a particular kind of user study, etc. - there's very likely someone who does know that is an email send away. At a start-up, even a larger O(100's) people start-up, your network is more limited.
At least at the large tech company I work for, when people are ready for something new, that usually means moving within the company. This isn't usually an option at a start-up. This means that all that stuff you learned about the company's special ways of doing things maintain transferrable for longer.
I've found an entrepreneurial approach can be valuable at a larger company. At the company I work for, it's not unheard of for new ideas to go to market in the matter of months, but very often management looks for successful milestones at a rate not that different from what startup management or VCs look for: some kind of 2-3 year plan of where you want to end up, and with a milestone release within the next 6-12 months, closed betas before that, etc. All the same things apply about knowing your customer (who, in this case, might be someone else inside the company), understand the customers' needs, start with a problem and not a solution, and all that.
One of the biggest differences has been navigating the corporate structure. At a 300 person company, you probably know who to go to for any possible problem you can imagine. At a large tech company, you probably don't know who to talk to, and you might not even know who to talk to in order to find out who to talk to. Finding the right person to talk to is more of a skill in these larger settings, and it helps to understand the corporate structure, what are the different teams working on similar kinds of things as your team, and all that sort of thing.
So, that's a bunch of things, let me know if there's some other aspect of the switch you're curious about.