Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 5:43 PM UTC

mpmpmpmp wrote: post #132

bcrosby95 wrote: post #71

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> Learn to work with this and you can extract gold. Curious if you have any tips for this stuff? My instinct would be to just poke and prod things, writing tests or documenting things as I go along. "I wonder what happens when I do X" -> write a test, get a result. "I wonder what data looks like here" -> examine it, write a summary of what I found. Etc.

I have been a contractor/consultant for the last 7 years. What I've seen when you try and go down that "write a test" path is. Oh there's a 2500 line stored procedure with hardcoded network paths for production data in it. Or, this api only runs on the 2nd Tuesday of the Month but only after 8pm when the day of the month is also even. There's so much do-it-live embedded in the legacy systems it takes months to make e…

Post by nullandvoid » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 5:50 PM UTC

gonational wrote: post #131

mliker wrote: post #102

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No, that's not the way it works at big companies like AWS, Google, Microsoft (source: me, I've worked at all 3). A large company attracts various types of people. It's not homogeneous like what you describe. Also, there are plenty of opportunities to practice "intrapreneurship" within a large company with lots of resources to impact the world in a positive way.

“Intrepreneurship” is a nice euphemism for “here, you can work on your cute little side projects and then we will keep the IP and patents.”

Post by dlhavema » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 5:55 PM UTC

ornornor wrote: post #25

soared wrote: post #18

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* Things work slowly, so relax. The extent of this is hard to grasp outside of bigco. At oracle we had layoffs/reorg - no real work was done for ~7 days, and it took 3 months to figure out our new roles/responsibilities. Some people were paid $40k+ in that time period and did very little work. Things occasionally move very very slow. Twiddle your thumbs and be happy about your huge salary, don't quit like I did!

Seriously. I heard big companies were slow before but I didn’t realize the magnitude of it until I joined one. Most people where I work either only produce real work for anywhere between 40 to 10% of their time. The rest is either filled by busywork or twiddling your thumbs (depending on individuals)

Post by Aperocky » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

hnanon486282 wrote: post #128

katzgrau wrote: post #82

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Having worked at Big Co and then on my own company for years, this is exactly what I was thinking. You'll lose professional autonomy in exchange for a good salary, job security, and resume bling. And you probably won't have to work as hard or as often (again, probably).

In my career, I've had almost the opposite experience. At $bigco, it was possible to beg/borrow for 100k to solve some problem, or hack together some tooling to solve a problem the team was running into. Need some servers and licenses, and it's near year end, partner with a program manager who hasn't used all his budget, help solve their problems, and get things done. I ended up spending something like $250k before t…

Post by nnoitra » Tue, Jun 09, 2020, 5:58 PM UTC

throwaway9191a wrote: post #103

bobbytherobot wrote: post #93

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"you probably won't have to work as hard" For me, it was a question of: do I put in 40% to get 90% completed, or do I put in 150% to get 99% completed?

I'd like to echo this, along with the "relax" sentiment from other comments. I worked incredibly hard to open source a project at a faang. I was even given a customer obsession award for it. No promo.. and no promo level projects for the next year or so... and now this open source project is "too old" for promo consideration. I've learned to relax and give just enough to not be marked LE. I now have a lot of time to…