Not dealing, but living with this, here in Mexico is a common practice even in small companies, everyone seems to be trying to "not doing". I'll read all the comments about this.
Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
211–219 of 219 posts
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#212I'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 t…
Or software (and hardware) lifecycle. When to patch, what has support, is it a compliant configuration, etc
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How long did it take you to finally get approved? I don't even have a contact with the background people, I filled out information on the third party site, and they finished report within a day or two. But they couldn't reach the companies, and didn't ask me about any proof, just wrote a report that they couldn't reach them.
I had a company like that and my companies HR department handled it directly. It took me two weeks specifically because of that one company.
If you have w-2s, paycheck subs, and Boss contacts I think you HR company can handle it also.
Also you can make a W-2 online if you lost yours. just download the template and use a paycheck stub to fill it out.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Do you guys ever think there's more to life than being really really really ridiculously well compensated?
There is. That's what the ridiculous compensation is funding.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#215Oh 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…
Am I correct in assuming that Google Analytics (Enterprise) still stores all the collected data on google's servers, or does the enterprise designation mean it's locally hosted?
Yes - all stored with Google. Not locally hosted.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#216Earlier 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
Seems like the more wealth you have the harder it is to make risks…
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#217I work for a very large corporation (Fortune 100 that everyone has heard of). I was hired by a business unit back in the days before the company even had an IT department (back then everything technical was outsourced to another company). So for decades we did whatever we wanted. Eventually the company created an IT department and about 10 years later they got wind of us and insisted we get moved into IT. Complete he…
> And the company is perfectly happy with my work, since nobody else can get anything done either.
I just switched job from a big company to a fast-growing startup which doubled their engineer team size in one year. I was unhappy with my productivity in the new company, thinking I was not doing enough, but my managers said they were quite happy with my performance. I think I was comparing my productivity with the peak productivity in my previous role where I already spent years working on the system. But what the managers really measured is your relative performance compared to your other peers. So as long as you are doing okay relative to your peers, albeit all being unproductive, you would be okay.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#218Interesting that this is so complicated in a big Bay Area tech company. At a fruit-themed Bay Area company I can register a domain name behind a load balancer, issue a new cert, kickoff a VM to host it internally all in the same day without any approvals... so long as it is below a certain scale suitable for testing, skunkworks projects, etc. Approvals and meetings only become necessary if I want to deploy a producti…
Glad to hear there are good big companies out there.
Re: Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
#219Earlier 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.
That's a huge bias to bring in an interview. Sometimes you work on some cool project for a while, then it becomes boring, etc. Or sometimes you're stuck with that job because of lack of other local opportunities. Or whatever other reason.
I agree, big bias. I'm not totally being serious. But I have had really bad experiences with people working at banks.