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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

#61
I have worked in tech for two very large companies, both fortune 100, and well over 50k employees. I also worked for a small company that I could best describe as a late stage startup that was coming to terms with being a lifestyle business.

The trick to escaping bureaucracy is the same for both. Making friends with people, and talking to them directly when you need to massage the processes. It's just that it is much easier to be friends with 50 people than 5000. Working from home can be an issue, make sure to video chat when you can and goto as many official and unofficial events as you can.

If you have a good manager, and your manager has a good manager, they should have contacts around the company that can help with the red tape. Never abuse it, and when you're in a situation where your urge is to be a roadblock to another team, go out of your way to help them instead. It always comes back in a good way.

Office politics sucks, but it's the only way to stay sane in these environments.

Sometimes you have to remember that the friction is because they just don't know any better, or because they do no better, but they're too busy or too tired to create a better system. They are all dealing with the same nonsense, and it is soul crushing.

In my current job, I had managed to skirt a lot of the corporate nonsense for a long time, but we merged with a company that had a very by-the-book culture, and my manager had to resign for health reasons. Things have been downhill for the past few years, and if I could get a job making the same at a company that didn't do all that, I would probably take it.

..but that brings me to another point, I loved that small company, like family. Then One day a bunch of my friends were fired for personal/political reasons. I left a year or so later, and a year after that they sold the company, and a year after that the new company closed the office and just kept the data center. The point is that bigger companies are more stable, if you have a mortgage or kids it's really no choice.

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

#62

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 channe…

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

#63
The startups and small companies are playing offense - they are trying to get their foot in the door and hunting.

BigCos are playing defense - they want to maintain the status quo and not kill the golden goose. They've built a castle to protect it. It's only natural that they will add friction everywhere for the fear of killing the damn bird.

Relax and coast for a bit, and jump to a small company. But like others have said, you will work more hours, and they can be insanely high cognitive load for other reasons.

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

#64
I had worked at smaller shops, then took what I thought was going to be a next big step at a company who's mascot is a reptile. Friction EVERYWHERE. The TLDR was that I left after 5 months and that company was the most unhappy I've been in my career.

When I started, I had a single monitor machine that didn't have Visual Studio installed. I was told I'd have to wait till the next budget cycle for a second monitor. I didn't get Visual Studio installed for 3 WEEKS and no one seemed to care. I'm not sure why they thought it was fine for a six figure developer to basically be sitting idle for 3 weeks, but that attitude was basically the norm.

When I actually got coding, everything was road blocks. Policies and procedures everywhere. No one had time to explain anything. Everything had to be submitted through a ticketing system. It was just bad. Daily standups where I just made up BS because they'd barely given me anything to work on, and no one seemed to care.

The thing was that when I looked forward at my team lead, my manager, etc., who in theory would've been my next steps at the company I'd have to jump through ridiculous hoops just to get into those positions, and they all fundamentally had very little power. They were still at the bottom tier middle managers, and the BS policies, procedures, and technology decisions all got handed down from managers above them.

I couldn't deal with the environment, but from my coworkers who were there, I got the sense from them that they just accepted things. Progress was slow, jump through the hoops you're told to jump through, but by in large, it was steady well paying work that they could just check out at the end of the day. No harm in that, but it just felt like my career would just stagnate there, and I'd find it very hard to get out once I got comfortable with it. I planned on sticking around till 6 months, then looking. I wound up starting to reply back to recruiters earlier and was out in 5. Best decision I made was leaving.

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

#66

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.

I think that working at a bank is fantastic so long as a person can internalize the good parts.

The bank I was at had the best data practices of any company I’ve worked at by a mile. They wouldn’t hesitate to write huge checks to make sure that the hardware systems and teams supporting those systems were perfect. Software management was a bit procedural but the results were consistent and high quality.

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

#67
The big difference between large companies and small companies is that large companies prize specialization. The way to thrive at a big company isn't to be the person that sets up the entire stack for the company, it's by finding value in deep obscure corners of very specific niches and smoothly rolling out that value to orders of magnitude more people than you would had impacted with a package of full stack decisions in a smaller company.

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

#68
Friction is usually caused by reactive policies. Pain causes reaction. Pain like a customer complaint, or accidental data deletion. It usually causes red tape or people that got chewed out from allowing certain changes. It's good and it's bad. It's obviously good because there will be fewer customer complaints. But it's bad because the product does not evolve fast anymore - which may cause fewer customers long term.

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

#69

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 have worked at several big companies, including BigFatHugeBank and heartily agree with the above comment.

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

#70
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feeling like you're constantly blocked isn't fun either. Starting to get into the groove only to have to immediately stop, having to keep track of lots of threads where people put up roadblocks to justify their own jobs, etc. is not "a few minutes away from the production line". It's work all the same, and not the work most engineers sign up to do.

During that while, what stops you from reading a book, working on a consulting project on the side (thanks, WFH), learn some new skill? Life is more than serving your boss in the office.

There are still targets to be met and demands still being made of you. Sure, if you have nothing to do, do something good with your time; that's not always the position people are in.

> Life is more than serving your boss in the office.

Sure, I don't think anyone's saying you exist to serve your boss. But if you have to work a job, why not find one you actually like doing? I think what the OP describes would be a complete drain of my energy, even if I could read a book occasionally; working on actual code during my workday gives me an opportunity to be paid to learn new things and is honestly actually energizing. Why work on a tiny Nix environment on a toy project when I could be setting up a real-world Nix development environment that's deployed across tens of developer laptops, y'know?

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