I also work at a large company, I learned to have about 3 things in flight at all times because there will inevitably be a blocker on everything.
Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
151–160 of 219 posts
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#152Yes. 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…
> 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. Sound advice. The HN community (rightly) skews towards entrepreneur hackers who have a general distain for BigCo employment. I love this quote from Prof G on joining BigCo: https://youtu.be/ffDVe-NgFt4?t=662 You're going to have access to what is the greatest wealth generator in history an…
> The HN community (rightly) skews towards entrepreneur hackers who have a general distain for BigCo employment.
On the contrary, I find that most work at bigco or smaller companies and come to HN to play out their dreams of what it would be like to take the risks that people with lots of wealth can make freely
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#153Enjoy 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 produ…
> 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 It can . I worked at a 2400 person company. 'Dev/tech' side was... ~150 or so, so not thousands of devs, but not just '3 fol…
Sounds shitty - when there are personal relationships/nepotism/etc going on and it is impacting what gets done, then that is a major red flag for so many reasons. This time it sounds like someone gets to do what they want with database in production, but there can be so much more going on that is simply unseen, but could be much more odious (running the gamut from covering-up/ignoring harassment, right through to fraud or other criminality).
Regardless, I'd probably argue that a company with only 2400 employees let alone engineers is not what most people would consider "BigCo". In my mind, BigCo are thousands/tens-of-thousands of engineers - think FAANG, major Investment Banks, major technology companies (e.g. the IBMs, Microsofts, or Samsungs of the world). The sort of places that people (rightly or wrongly) aspire to work at, or at least have some common mind-share amongst the average person on the street.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#154That 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.
Jobs where the people that write the software are close to the people that use the software tend to have fewer process restrictions and less red tape because there is more direct accountability. Science teams, applied research, and some data science groups are set up this way.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#155Yes. 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 found that the more I delivered and the happier I made senior people, the more I could ignore the rules and process and friction and get stuff done. Probably a year or so in I barely paid any notice to most of it.
I had a huge amount of freedom, really. But after a bit over a decade I finally moved to the world of startups. I’d never go back.
So while you can definitely work on removing your own personal frictions, and it’s absolutely worth selectively breaking the rules, I’m not sure you’ll ever be as happy as you could be in a different environment if that’s how you feel now.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#156To sound a slightly different note: Yes - there's lots of friction. Bureaucracy is inevitable, given the cost of turning the ship/the risk level if something bad sneaks through. That said, there is a ton of potential leverage at BigCo - the scale is extraordinary. It is a trade - you get a far bigger lever, but it takes way longer to pull.
Thank you. I've been feeling frustrated at how slow (and hard) it is to pull the lever, and never noticed how much more powerful the lever is.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Sound advice. The HN community (rightly) skews towards entrepreneur hackers who have a general distain for BigCo employment. I love this quote from Prof G on joining BigCo: https://youtu.be/ffDVe-NgFt4?t=662 You're going to have access to what is the greatest wealth generator in history an…
> The HN community (rightly) skews towards entrepreneur hackers who have a general distain for BigCo employment. On the contrary, I find that most work at bigco or smaller companies and come to HN to play out their dreams of what it would be like to take the risks that people with lots of wealth can make freely
Also probably true.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#158I’ve faced this at multiple jobs at orgs of different size. My solution was to always have more than one thing available to work on so when one task bogs down in the mud due to organizational processes, I can go work on something else until the blocked task makes progress.
If you don’t have alternative things to do while things block, you might see about getting other things to do. Or, adapt your work style to minimize the number of times you run into these obstacles. The people I see get most frustrated are those that don’t adapt to the system and get frustrated when it doesn’t work the way they want it to. Adapting may be annoying and may break some comfortable habits, but in the long run I find it to be the route of least angst.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ask yourself the bigger question; what do you want out of life? Do you want to grind code for 80 hours a week and deal with 24/7 on-call rotations? Or do you want to put in your 40 hours, collect your RSUs, and live happily ever after? There is more to life than work, and #BigCos make it far easier to enjoy that.
I really want to do interesting enjoyable work to be honest.
Start your own company or work on side projects while you wait on administrative bullshit.
Why wait? Working at big tech is a bankrolling operation. I show up and collect my dough, nothing less nothing more.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#160I've done this, except it was big government.
Pick your battles. Not only is it exhausting to make everything a fight, but people will appreciate it more, and be on your side more, if you pick only the important things to stand your ground on.
Make friends. There will be people who feel the same way, finding them is usually good to get things done quickly. It can be important also to break down the team barriers. Requiring a different team to accomplish something is a big part of friction, and knowing individuals in those teams that get stuff done can help. The way to get them on side is to make their jobs easier, and again picking your battles and compromising are good ways to do this.
Get buy in on big changes. So this is different from making friends. You need to develop people that agree that a change needs to happen, and on a way of making that change. I'd start small, with convincing Individual Contributors first, particularly if there are very well respected ones. Then seeking out management and building the case that the changes will improve their situation. This can be a slow process. Managers will appreciate it if it can seem like their project, and once it does, you'll have their backing because they don't want it to fail.
All that said, there are certainly places where this sort of friction is minimal, usually remote devops driven start-ups or consultancies.
I'd use buzz words also, to help make your case. The whole DevOps shift comes with some principles that you can wield to make the case that infra changes should belong in the team, and CI/CD and similar require that VMs (well, pods really) be spun up easily, and from an API.