Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 219 posts

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

#171

Post by toss1 »

bavell wrote: post #164
toss1 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, exactly. The complexities of both running a large operation and operating globally are vastly greater than a small operation. Simply the number of nodes that must communicate has a combinatorial explosion. So, there needs to be a standard way of dealing with that, or entropy also explodes. So, bureaucracy happens, with processes that sorta fit everyone but rarely exactly fit, so friction increases. A saying I he…

> A saying I heard from Africa: "If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together". Love this! Definitely gonna use this sometime.

Indeed - it was very memorable for me too the first time I heard it !

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

#173

Post by ramphastidae »

PaywallBuster wrote: post #113
closeparen wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Seems totally reasonable to me.

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

#174

Post by thedougd »

xchaotic wrote: post #116
mring33621 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes and no. There are teams and people who protect their headcount and interests under the guise of compliance. But very often they're enforcing one interpretation or implementation of the law. And very often, they're audited as to whether they follow the process they designed and not the process itself.

Navigating the regulatory landscape to introduce change is high skill and art that I've rarely seen but does exist.

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

#175

Post by closeparen »

ramphastidae wrote: post #173
PaywallBuster wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Seems totally reasonable to me.

If you can have such a structured, rote process then why isn't it just automated/self-serve? That is one thing I like about my medium-sized (public) company, you can't necessarily touch things yourself but you only wait in line for human attention if your request is somewhat unusual or actually calls for discretion and creativity.

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

#176

Post by analog31 »

I've worked for LittleCo, and now I work for BigCo, a F100. I outgrew the LittleCo. There was literally nobody I could talk to about my work, and doing stuff at a higher level was probably threatening to a business with no succession planning.

Sometimes I amuse myself by imagining things from a management perspective, which I'm supposed to represent. I'm a physicist, not a software dev, so I don't know VM or SSL, in their particulars. But still, if the company has a process for making those things, in a way that's manageable and secure for the business, then it's a step towards automating them. From that perspective, the tasks that you did at LittleCo are seen as things that could, if not should, be automated. Or delegated.

One comment in this thread mentions BigCo turning people into drones, but viewed from a couple levels above you, doing work that could be automated or delegated, is drone work. Each "side" has its own view of what drones are and do.

It may take some effort, or even just patience, to get over the annoyance of "friction" that doesn't seem to bother the higher ups, and focus on the things that they care about, or you care about, or both. After nearly 25 years at BigCo, the friction actually has a negligible impact on my work. I avoid taking an emotional stake in stuff that isn't valued when viewed from above. What I take away is the learning that's of more widespread or lasting value.

Or you might like LittleCo better. In Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw, two people are in heaven and hell, respectively, and neither one can stand it, so they agree to trade places. A couple things I've liked about BigCo: 1) It's unlikely that I will ever be the smartest person. There are world experts in my skill areas, whom I can talk to. 2) They've managed to stay in business, whereas not being able to stay in business was why the company had to sell out to BigCo in the first place.

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

#177

Post by edmcnulty101 »

drachun wrote: post #72

Sorry to piggyback on the question, but I just got an offer from one of those big companies. The starting date is fast approaching, but offer is contingent on the background check which hasn't come in. The third party company hired, generated their background report over two weeks ago, but the hiring company hasn't communicated their approval. The check had some warnings, because I worked for small companies that hav…

I had the same issue. I got every W-2, a paycheck stub from every job, a boss contact from every job, all my school transcripts, and pretty much any and all paper work I could come up with and uploaded to the background check ppl.

Then I bugged the background check people literally every 2 to 3 days and asked the status.

I would push back your start date until it's confirmed though to be honest.

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

#178

Post by akira2501 »

edmcnulty101 wrote: post #134
akira2501 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mid-sized well established companies engaged in markets where there is active growth. You get maturity, experience, and a true desire for competition... and if you can move the needle for that type of group you will be well rewarded and you'll probably actually enjoy it.

How many employees is considered mid sized? Like 200?

I have not spent much time thinking about this, but anecdotally:

It's hard to quantify that way, I feel it would depend on how "wide" the structure of the organization is. Perhaps "layers of management" between where the money is actually made and where the decisions are made is a good metric. Two or three, in my experience, have been the best places to work.

Anything more than that and the friction exponentially increases.

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

#179

Post by mike22 »

drachun wrote: post #72

Sorry to piggyback on the question, but I just got an offer from one of those big companies. The starting date is fast approaching, but offer is contingent on the background check which hasn't come in. The third party company hired, generated their background report over two weeks ago, but the hiring company hasn't communicated their approval. The check had some warnings, because I worked for small companies that hav…

If it’s a reasonable company, they will be willing to move your start date upon (polite) request, justified by the delay. In my recent job change, there were a couple of things that moved the timelines (only a couple of weeks, not months like your case), and the recruiter adjusted my start date like it was SOP.

Re resigning: make sure you have some concrete evidence of passing all contingencies in the hiring process (even go so as to ask the recruiter if any steps remain). Only after that, give your notice.

Post reply on HN