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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

#91

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

I left BigCo that was not in the bay or tech and am at small_co (If work is broken out to specialized teams (SSL certs, scans, security stuff - team A, VM's and storage - team B, networking/firewalls - team C, etc.) there will be friction, doesn't matter if its some cool company or some boring Fortune 500 company making farm equip.

You should be able to figure out the scale of friction with interview questions like "say a new project spins up to build a web+mobile app/CRUD/SQL and needs servers - walk me through how many teams+time it takes to get servers up and running where a dev can deploy code"

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

#92

Post by bdcravens »

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…

> 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.

I work for a very small "non-tech" company, have been here 12 years, and have a great income. The tradeoff I had to make was a much higher level of responsibility. (I'm at the very top of the tech stack - if something isn't working, there's no one for me to blame, aside from a vendor like AWS)

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

#93

Post by sto_hristo »

That is what you get with already established projects and teams. And it's only the beginning; legacy code will follow, along with horrible styles and ancient practices, and it will be much worse.

That is why I love startups. I gotta find me a nice startup in need of a sr. full stack engineer with backend emphasis.

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

#94

Post by donohoe »

Oh god, yeah. I was happy to stop working at such a place. Leave.

At one such company, no names, they had a rather large consumer facing website. I was told it had no analytics other than a homegrown solution (which was terrible). Then it turned out that had Google Analytics (Enterprise) but everyone had forgotten about it. They denied it at first, but I showed them screenshots of the Network tab in Chrome where it was pretty obvious. Suddenly I had access. So far this is 3 weeks or emails.

With access I realized the implementation was botched. All view states were being handled by a hash in the URL so all Page Views in GA were reported in one URL.

I requested a minor code tweak to account for this. I was told by the dev team it would take 6-8 weeks to implement such a change. I was assured this was rather complex and they'd need to free up people too to work on it so that could take longer.

I told them the code change was already written and I'd included it in the initial request. I referenced the template file within their system where they change would live and included tests. They still dragged their feet. It got completed in my last week. Copy/pasted exactly as I'd written it.

It was utter madness.

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

#95

Post by aadilmaan »

As an organization scales and grows, the layers through which decision making is required inevitable increase. Now, that doesn't mean you have to accept this. You have found yourself in an opportune place where you can have impact and reduce some of the overhead. BUT, be warned, you can never fully eliminate overhead. That is the cost of growth and BigCo status.

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

#97

Post by snakey »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #33
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 channe…

OP, I’m also a twenty something that moved from a fast paced start-up to a Behemoth.

It’s been 7 months so far and throughout the first 6 months, I have fought and resisted how BigCo operates—it left me tired and even more miserable. Within the last month however, I have stumbled across the same advice as has been given by the wise members above. This advice is invaluable, accept that within these organisations a lot is outside of your control. Rather, focus on projects, learning and hobbies outside of your work that bring you joy.

If your feelings remain unchanged within a couple of months to a year then consider making a change to another Co. Good or bad, these experiences are invaluable in helping us to decide on how we wish to pursue our careers.

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

#99

Post by moomin »

One trick I’ve used is quite simply having five things on at once. You keep notes of where each project is, and work to get each one blocked. When they get unblocked, you switch to that thing until it’s blocked again.

There will be people who insist that you should “focus on the most important thing” but if it’s blocked what’s the point?

The other thing to do is make a lot of friends in related departments. It’s amazing how much faster things will go when someone does you a favour. Expect to be doing favours in return.

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

#100

Post by jerDev »

I am too authentic to work at FAANG. My salary as staff eng. is roughly equivalent but I can argue, throw a fit, change direciton, say my opinion etc etc every day. I push through friction, I ignore managers, I do things my way. I ask for forgiveness not permission because I have a bias for action not confirmation.

Software engineering interviews do not value authenticity, typically. They want you to say what they want to hear. I purposely go in the opposite direction. I am always myself, say how I feel, and challenge the interviewer.

My girlfriend ( soon to be wife ) has no issues getting any job she wants in software engineering. She will recite exactly the words they want to hear, and they love her. I will say exactly what I want to say in an interview and they will love or hate me. I have no intention of changing.

My best advice? Leave for a smaller company that lets you do whatever you want to do and perform at an exceptional level. You get the same satisfaction, same pay, and you may only be 1 step down from VP. You can grab VP's, C's for a comment, you can do whatever you want ( as long as you perform ).

That's the way. For me at least.

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