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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

#111

Post by Tyr42 »

I mean, I have a similar experience, where I can be demotivated because I took a summer to deploy a website which has one button on it, and a service to write a bit when the button is pushed.

I felt like I could have built out the project in a weekend with php, and I don't even know much php.

But then, in the "productionalization step" there was a lot of leverage from being at bigCo. I could get it internationalized super easily. I got security, encryption keys, done. I got a hostname with a few clicks. I got redundant deployments, and separate release / dev environments. I have metrics and monitoring. My DB is backed up and region sharded and all kinds of stuff I don't care about. Users can delete their accounts and my db can get purged.

So building the "demo" version felt a lot slower, but transitioning it to the production version was a lot faster than me working on my own.

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

#113

Post by PaywallBuster »

closeparen wrote: post #101
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…

From MediumCo I will say: there is a lot of friction, quite intentionally, when you go off the rails. As a backend engineer, messing with things like VMs and SSL certificates yourself is definitely way off the rails. We want that to be hard. You are supposed to be creating and iterating on services using the standard application frameworks, deployed to the standard shared clusters, communicating through the standard…

work at managed service provider

everything is a ticket

ssl is expiring,

- make a ticket for the customer,

- request a quotation,

- wait for approval,

- finally issue the cert manually,

- finally deploy it (manually, using some tool of course)

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

#116

Post by xchaotic »

mring33621 wrote: post #78
roflyear wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have worked at 2 really big banks and they have many very talented, well-rounded people. The friction is there to protect the firm. It's true, though, that upper leadership tends to be incompetent. Don't hire them. But finance tech VPs and ExecDirs are often highly skilled, smart people.

A lot of the friction in the banks is for legal reasons - they HAVE to abide by certain protocols. If you treat that as an extra challenge rather than a hindrance it will be more rewarding.

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

#117

Post by naet »

I'll trade you responsibilities.

I work at a small agency and often do work for non-technical clients, or get hired to work on a completely unmaintained legacy system. I end up owning nearly everything myself, and it's a massive pain in the ass.

You might be frustrated with the process of getting a new VM, but you also don't have to own and maintain all the VMs by yourself. I bet you won't have to personally manage the billing of this VM directly, or monitor for any changes in usage or pricing, etc, but somebody in your organization will.

I often have to own and manage the SSL certs on dozens of unrelated properties... and own and address all the front end issues in every framework... and all the ci/cd issues for every legacy codebase... and anything else I want I gotta do. I also have to properly research all providers and price tiers and budget it all for my clients and then sell them on any service I consider worth it.

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

#118

Post by DeathArrow »

spencerflem wrote: post #47
honkler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

serious question: why do you want to "get work done"? You are getting paid regardless. Maybe take time out and work on an open source project. Maybe do consulting on the side. Read a book or something, perhaps?

I feel like it's not ridiculous to want to have the single biggest part of your life be for something.

You go to work for money,not for something. Otherwise you would be busy doing charitable stuff.

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

#119

Post by kitd »

What you call friction is usually a symptom of process. BigCos use process to protect themselves from stress and failure. When things go wrong at BigCo, it often hits the news and can affect the livelihoods of a large number of people and cost millions. Process is designed to stop that happening.

In contrast, few people notice if SmallCo's website is down for a while or a bill isn't paid.

Having worked at both Big and SmallCo, the stress/salary rate is usually much lower in BigCo thanks to that process, so, assuming you want to carry on working there, embrace the process and understand that (most of) it is your friend.

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

#120

Post by mikesabbagh »

I see it as a game. The startup environment is level 1 of the game. you learn about VMs and how to start them. At BigCo, this is level 5 or 10. Nothing is easy, to start a VM you have to make sure your system is compliant, the ip is restricted from some countries, the linux version is LTS and bla bla bla

To keep your sanity, make sure to have a personal side project where you can do things fast

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