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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

#191

Post by mymllnthaccount »

barnabee wrote: post #155
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…

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,…

>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.

Yeah, I agree with this. My strategy has been to figure out what my boss wants to do, figure out what I want to do, and figure out what my job duties actually are. Then focus on the intersection of the first two and doing the minimal work necessary for the third. This means trying to get around process for your boss's pet project or to work on what you want while making your internal customers go through as many hoops as your organizational structure allows when they want you to do your job duties.

This probably comes off a bit cynical and I do have some pride in doing a good job, but this is kind of my basic corporate strategy.

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

#192

Post by leoh »

tintor wrote: post #89
rdoherty wrote: post #75

This sounds suspiciously similar to where I used to work, and was one of the reasons I left. Every project required working with 3-5 other teams for either help or 'alignment' (aka approval). Getting a new service live required many tickets, meetings, manual edits to configuration by other teams, etc. I think large companies with low friction are the exception, not the rule. It takes MASSIVE amounts of work to build…

Google, a low friction company? I moved to Google from Microsoft, and I was shocked with the amount of friction and chaos at Google. Everything takes longer to get done.

Depends on product area, team

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

#194

Post by will5421 »

donohoe wrote: post #94

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 w…

Sounds like those analytics weren’t important to the company.

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

#195

Post by PaywallBuster »

closeparen wrote: post #175
ramphastidae wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"let's encrypt is not good enough, our customers are "enterprise", bla bla"

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

#196

Post by barnabee »

mymllnthaccount wrote: post #191
barnabee wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

>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. Yeah, I agree with this. My strategy has been to figure out what my boss wants to do, figure out what I want to do, and figure out what my job duties actually are. Then focus on the intersection of the first two and doing the minimal work necessary for the third. This…

The important thing is that job duties often don’t have to stay static.

Especially if you are already doing a good job at what you want to be doing and keeping someone senior happy, it’s often possible and sometimes even surprisingly easy to evolve your official/main duties in that direction too.

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

#197

Post by Swannie »

closeparen wrote: post #175
ramphastidae wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Because our users are irresponsible, and will order 1000's of dollars of externally signed certificates..."

shock horror maybe they might actually ... get more done and therefore need more stuff :D

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

#198

Post by raffraffraff »

daveevad wrote: post #138
raffraffraff wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a bank for 8 years, but I learned how to work around the red tape and get things done. I wasn't alone. We had a ridiculous project approval process for any work that would take more than X man hours. They'd shut you down because you didn't have have approval for the budget. Yes, even though they're paying you to sit at a desk, you have to get executive sponsorship for the budget to cover the wages that th…

> you can get 10 incident tickets created over a 1 week period, this gets picked up as a "major problem" This is an interesting perspective but perhaps crosses the line.

Thing is, they were genuine "issues". The bank developed internal software following the waterfall model, with 6-12 months between major releases. Each release had to have a project with a budget. Each release had enormous cost (with individual line items like "$1m: system testing" on the bill). And there was a somewhat passed rollout, but it was pretty much big bang at the end of the dev/test cycle.

After a release, there was a very short period of watchfulness where issues found in production would either be marked as "minor" (this will hold until the next release and the users be damned) or "major" and the entire system would be rolled back (for now). So every release had a bunch of awful bugs that drive users insane. They'd complain, of course, but the senior brass would just disperse "release notes" via fax to the branches and tell them how to work around issues. In other words "button it". So the users wouldn't create incident tickets.

Fast forward a few weeks, you're bored because you're waiting for project approval, so you make use of the incident process to make some improvements. Perhaps it crosses a line. But I had some direct managers (lower rungs) who loved the idea. "Fuck it", they'd say, "the process is there, use it!"

All that from taking the ITIL course seriously. If you're going to hack the system, understand it

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

#199

Post by danrocks »

loandigger wrote: post #161

Keep this in mind: In a large organization, NO SINGLE PERSON makes a decision. It's THE PROCESS that makes the decision. And THE PROCESS takes time. One of the greatest skills you can learn at a large organization is identifying, bypassing and avoiding THE PROCESS. It can be done, you just need to figure out how.

A Kafkaesque view of corporations, if I’ve ever seen one.

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

#200

Post by anothernewdude »

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)

Reminds me of when our license for ElasticSearch was expiring, the process took so long (we wrote a countdown application to test out our local PaaS) that it had expired, and just silently turned off secure auth.
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