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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

#141

Post by rsstack »

ghaff wrote: post #77
ageitgey wrote: post #35

This is not just normal, but this is "The Deal" that you are accepting when you join a large company. It's normal that a single developer is maybe 20% as efficient at a big company compared to at a small company. What you used to accomplish in one day will now take you a week (after team processes, code reviews, deployment requests, etc, etc). But the trade-off is the big companies have figured out how to keep thousa…

I've worked at both relatively large (thousands of employees) and small (less than 10) companies. When I transitioned from small back to large-ish about 10 years ago, a couple things struck me. (Really, I was reminded of because I had worked at a similar magnitude size company previously.) There was so much "machinery" to support me in various ways. But the internal communications to take advantage of that machinery…

Not all large companies have so much machinery! While people think of MAGMA, maybe Capital One, Clouflare, etc. - there are many huge companies that aren't tech-first that have the internal communication responsibilities but without better developer tooling than small startups. That _sucks_ if you're the kind of person who's used to high personal velocity.

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

#142

Post by ghaff »

rsstack wrote: post #141
ghaff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked at both relatively large (thousands of employees) and small (less than 10) companies. When I transitioned from small back to large-ish about 10 years ago, a couple things struck me. (Really, I was reminded of because I had worked at a similar magnitude size company previously.) There was so much "machinery" to support me in various ways. But the internal communications to take advantage of that machinery…

Not all large companies have so much machinery! While people think of MAGMA, maybe Capital One, Clouflare, etc. - there are many huge companies that aren't tech-first that have the internal communication responsibilities but without better developer tooling than small startups. That _sucks_ if you're the kind of person who's used to high personal velocity.

I was using machinery in a more general sense given I don't do development.

For me, it's things like lots of marketing program people, public relations, analyst relations, competitive analysts, designers, editors, etc. They can offload a lot of work (and, in many cases, can do that work better than I could). But it's a lot of people to keep informed and coordinated.

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

#143

Post by javajosh »

When latency increases, concurrency increases. This means extra pressure on you to create personal systems that help you deal with more concurrent processes, and systems that help you follow up on long-lived processes. Your a process who's been living in a synchronous, snappy world, and now you live in an asynchronous, slow world. Your throughput can be high, but you need different tools.

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

#144

Post by rsstack »

ghaff wrote: post #142
rsstack wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all large companies have so much machinery! While people think of MAGMA, maybe Capital One, Clouflare, etc. - there are many huge companies that aren't tech-first that have the internal communication responsibilities but without better developer tooling than small startups. That _sucks_ if you're the kind of person who's used to high personal velocity.

I was using machinery in a more general sense given I don't do development. For me, it's things like lots of marketing program people, public relations, analyst relations, competitive analysts, designers, editors, etc. They can offload a lot of work (and, in many cases, can do that work better than I could). But it's a lot of people to keep informed and coordinated.

> marketing program people, public relations, analyst relations, competitive analysts, designers, editors

I guess it depends on the role. I don't think startup developers do any of these (except maybe design) :)

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

#145

Post by phendrenad2 »

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…

This is normal. Background checks - of the sort where they actually try to contact old employers and verify employment history - are a total joke, especially ever since everyone in HR started to 'work' from home. I've seen background checks come back a full month after the person had already started their job and had access to all of the internal systems and were collecting paychecks. Most companies won't deny you the job just because the background check is taking a long time. And if they did, that would be a bad PR move for them I think.

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

#147

Post by drachun »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #145
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…

This is normal. Background checks - of the sort where they actually try to contact old employers and verify employment history - are a total joke, especially ever since everyone in HR started to 'work' from home. I've seen background checks come back a full month after the person had already started their job and had access to all of the internal systems and were collecting paychecks. Most companies won't deny you th…

But how do I start the new job? I still have my old job, and I'm afraid to quit until the background is done, is this wrong? Should I just go for it?

I get how people without a job can start, but how do I start? Feels risky to resign from current.

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

#148

Post by SheinhardtWigCo »

javajosh wrote: post #143

When latency increases, concurrency increases. This means extra pressure on you to create personal systems that help you deal with more concurrent processes, and systems that help you follow up on long-lived processes. Your a process who's been living in a synchronous, snappy world, and now you live in an asynchronous, slow world. Your throughput can be high, but you need different tools.

Concretely: it helps to have one or two ongoing mini-projects that are insulated from upstream requirements and not too difficult to dip in and out of.

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

#149

Post by yakak »

Yes. I did things like create custom scripts to work more effectively with many different drafts in the revision control we were using. This allowed me to have more than a dozen projects going at a time so there was always something I could switch to that wasn't held up by the friction.

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

#150

Post by jacobyoder »

mattlondon wrote: post #31

Enjoy 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 folks in a basement' sort of place. Lots of 'process', but only for some people (like me). Other people - people who were dating management, for example, could make whatever changes they wanted.

I would need to have a formal meeting with 2-3 "sr" folks to request a database index, then have to do a presentation about why it was needed, then wait for 'review' ("this might break something else"). But then other folks would literally just go on the database (because they had direct access) and fuck with whatever they felt like.

And... I'd be dinged because my deliverable was late because... "well... you should have planned your project better" (when... I had no hand in planning or setting deadlines). Not in my wildest dreams did I think requesting 2 indexes on a couple tables that only our application used would require 2.5 calendar weeks and multiple meetings, so... unsure how I should have raised a flag earlier that we might hit some roadblocks.

But yeah... hey, if you already had access to prod dbs, you could just go in and make live changes without testing or documentation ("it's OK, Steve used to be on the database team - he knows what he's doing").

Process/overhead isn't necessarily bad, but applied unequally, you wind up with hypocrisy and resentment (and people like me leaving in less than a year).

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