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Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction

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Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction

#31

Post by mattlondon »

Enjoy the 35-40 hour work week and stock options that are actually worth something I guess?

For what it is worth, I am at a BigCo and while yes it is true you cannot just hammer out 4000 lines of unreviewed code and push to production without someone else being involved, you also benefit because people aren't just changing stuff willy-nilly. E.g. your project you've been working on wont suddenly stop working in production out of the blue because Clive decided to totally change the database table schemas at 4am on Wednesday morning and nobody told you about it etc etc

Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction

#32

Post by honkler »

dkarp wrote: post #26
honkler wrote: post #21

Can there be a better display of first world (actually SF bay) problems than this post by OP? All Over the world, workers yearn for breathing time - A few minutes away from the the production line. They wish their tool breaks and the management takes a long while to provide a replacement. What’s your issue, op? You seem very excited to generate shareholder profit.

Problem is you're normally still judged by what you deliver, so you can't just chill and wait for things to get done

no, not really. You are judged relative to others. And others aren't producing crap ton in this sort of environment.

Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction

#33

Post by sillysaurusx »

ravenstine wrote: post #18

Yes. It even happens at medium sized companies. One answer is to accept the way things are at BigCo and to just coast along in your role, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Another answer is to work at an early-stage startup or a small non-tech company where you can move fast. The tradeoff there is lack of job security and lesser pay. Don't ever expect to move fast at BigCo. It's a BigCo for a reason. By moving fa…

OP, there's a lot of wisdom in this comment. I suspect you might be 20-something instead of 30-something, and in hindsight I wish I'd relaxed more. And I especially wish I'd learned to play the politics game, or at least pay attention to it. Your alliances will make or break your career at BigCo. You should make sure that your manager feels like you're directly advancing their career, not just yours.

I suggest channeling your ambition into your own projects, hobbies, and interests. If I'd spent more time making my own game engine rather than working on theirs, I'd still have it today.

Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction

#35

Post by ageitgey »

This is not just normal, but this is "The Deal" that you are accepting when you join a large company.

It's normal that a single developer is maybe 20% as efficient at a big company compared to at a small company. What you used to accomplish in one day will now take you a week (after team processes, code reviews, deployment requests, etc, etc).

But the trade-off is the big companies have figured out how to keep thousands of people productive. They might individually be less productive, but as a whole they accomplish more than a small company can accomplish. Some do it better than others, but no big company works like a small company.

That's just how it is. It's easier to solve problems with small groups of people than large groups of people. If the problem takes a large group of people, it will be a lot less efficient.

I would even say that working at a big company as essentially a different skillset than working at a start-up or small company. In a big company, your main job is to get other people to do things and you are successful based on how well you can do that. In a small company, your job is to do things yourself.

If you really hate the big company world, you should consider moving back to a small company. It's never going to not be like that.

Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction

#36

Post by wussboy »

honkler wrote: post #21

Can there be a better display of first world (actually SF bay) problems than this post by OP? All Over the world, workers yearn for breathing time - A few minutes away from the the production line. They wish their tool breaks and the management takes a long while to provide a replacement. What’s your issue, op? You seem very excited to generate shareholder profit.

It's not wrong to enjoy your work. This person's experiences are real to them, and they have the right to feel them.

If only the most unfortunate person in the world can claim injustice or dissatisfaction, if only their problem can be solved, progress will grind to a halt.

Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction

#37

Post by strikelaserclaw »

honkler wrote: post #32
dkarp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is you're normally still judged by what you deliver, so you can't just chill and wait for things to get done

no, not really. You are judged relative to others. And others aren't producing crap ton in this sort of environment.

i'm always baffled at the amount of effort it took pass the interview vs how easy it is to actually coast in this job and yes, you need to do just enough to keep pace with your peers.

Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction

#38

Post by xtracto »

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #3
pfortuny wrote: post #2

That is exactly what Big means in this context: something indistinguishable from bureaucracy. I am sorry for you but if you want to be able to work “freely” and “get things done”, a big corporation is the worst place to work in. I am not happy to bring bad tidings. Edit: no business gets “Big” without a good paper trail and this implies that no action is performed unless some previous paper work has been carried out.

Yeah, It's a good learning experience at least. Never worked at one of these. Guess I naively assumed that since it was from #SiliconValley it might be different. What do you think would be the best types of jobs to target for lower friction? Startups I guess.

I've come to prefer working in companies that are between Series A and Series B funding: After Series A is when the startups really have money for compensation. Series B is where companies start implementing bureaucracy like OKRs, permissions for everything and the org chart starts getting deep.

Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction

#39

Post by irrational »

I work for a very large corporation (Fortune 100 that everyone has heard of). I was hired by a business unit back in the days before the company even had an IT department (back then everything technical was outsourced to another company). So for decades we did whatever we wanted. Eventually the company created an IT department and about 10 years later they got wind of us and insisted we get moved into IT. Complete hell. Our productivity took an insane nosedive. As you said, it is slow as molasses to get anything done and everything requires so many (SO MANY!) meetings. At first this was very stressful, but eventually I just gave up. Whereas before I could get in a good 30 hours of productive work done a week (meetings are rarely productive), now I am lucky to get 5 hours of productive work done. Instead I spend the majority of my time in meetings or waiting for people to get back to me. 2 things help. First I work on personal projects in all the downtime. Second I started as an online instructor at a university teaching web development to students. So I spend time helping the students. And the company is perfectly happy with my work, since nobody else can get anything done either. It’s insane, but I learned to just let it go. If the company doesn’t care about how much productivity they are losing, why should I care?

Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction

#40

Post by roflyear »

ravenstine wrote: post #18

Yes. It even happens at medium sized companies. One answer is to accept the way things are at BigCo and to just coast along in your role, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Another answer is to work at an early-stage startup or a small non-tech company where you can move fast. The tradeoff there is lack of job security and lesser pay. Don't ever expect to move fast at BigCo. It's a BigCo for a reason. By moving fa…

I've worked at a few startups that have this problem too. Mostly because tech leadership came from a bank.

I would never hire someone again if they have worked at a bank for more than a couple of years.

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