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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

#81

Post by toss1 »

nonfamous wrote: post #57
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…

It took me a long time to figure this out, but the BigCo friction does come with benefits. Particularly benefits of scale and risk reduction. Need your app localized? Surprise, that happens automatically with BigCo processes. Didn’t think about GDPR compliance? Surprise, part of the delay you’re experiencing is that review. Need an awareness campaign? There’s a whole marketing team to help you with that. Thing big an…

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 heard from Africa: "If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together". GP is going far and together, and yes the other people will necessarily slow you down vs going alone.

The decision is whether one really wants this journey, in which case, learn how to work within the large org, or actually wants the faster but less secure career.

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

#82

Post by linuxftw »

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'm fine waiting for months and pushing the date, but will they still want me?

Yeah, most big corporations will understand you can't give a 2 weeks until you're cleared to start. For you, this is a life impacting decision, for them it's just business as usual.

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

#83

Post by bityard »

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…

Do NOT quit your current job until you have assurance from your new job that you are officially hired.

If you're worried about not having enough time to gracefully exit your old job before starting the new one, that should have been part of your counter-offer to the new company. It's not necessarily too late to do that still, and the new company should be understanding with pushing back the start date, especially since they are the ones dragging their feet with the final steps. THEY are the ones causing the delay and the humans involved should be sympathetic to that. If they are not, you don't want to work there anyway.

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

#84

Post by jeffwask »

This is why I have decided to stay focused on smaller growth phase companies where I feel like my impact is wider and I can drive change and see results.

I think it's important for everyone to experience different types of companies different roles, and find a space where you feel happy and successful.

The spot may change over time or it may not.

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

#85

Post by dirtybirdnj »

> The one thing I'm noticing is that it's miserable to work here because EVERYTHING has friction and takes days to get done

I worked at a large media corporation with an office in times square NYC and it was the most unprofessional and demoralizing experience. The level of CYA behavior was mind blowing, it was like interacting with an alien race wearing people suits.

There are people that get off on this kind of environment and thrive in it. They don't care how corrosive it is to the people forced to tolerate it for survival.

It never gets better, get out now before they start inventing KPIs to shame you into submission

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

#86

Post by dangus »

throwbigdata wrote: post #45

All these people telling you to coast are right for 80% of the population. If you have great ability, do t squander it. Get another job where you can be more effective. Find your passion and your fortune will likely follow. I eschewed advice like the others give, and I didn’t have to work after 35. Yes I got lucky but I also worked hard and failed and got back up and found a place to succeed. Big companies are mostly…

I want to push back on this. "Big companies are for drones" is a way to shame people who aren't a part of tech bro hustle culture, and it's a way to play yourself up as being better than the average person.

It's an expression and promotion of inequality: only the "best" get to have a fulfilling job, everyone else has to work tech support at CVS or flip burgers at Burger King. I'm doing well because I "worked hard and failed." [1]

If you're stuck doing something lame, you're just a "drone" who wasn't smart, connected, and cool enough.

> Find your passion and your fortune will likely follow.

Will it? I'd like you to meet some very talented illustrators and graphic designers I know who still live at home or with roommates. If you've got "fortune" (never needing to work after 35), you've got luck and privilege, not passion.

Big companies pay more, give out equity that's worth something on the open market, and have better retirement and health plans. What fortune do you expect someone to find being ground down to burnout by a startup expecting 60 hour weeks with crap benefits?

I say, let's dispense with the unrealistic notion that any of us are going to "change the world" through for-profit work. We are all drones, and pretending we are not is at best going to lead to an endless cycle of chasing career fulfillment that's just out of reach.

We should strive to be happy with just existing and that means not overworking ourselves in hopes of being a part of "the next big thing." We should also strive for enough income equality so that people who didn't get lucky like you aren't suffering from overwork, poverty, and poor health outcomes.

We're born and we work and we die. Even people who "changed the world" at their company mostly just made some money for the investors. Numerically, most startup companies that have ever been founded don't exist anymore.

What was all that hustle worth for employees at GrooveShark, Vine, Pebble, or StumbleUpon? Their sweat eventually swirled right down the drain, meanwhile their peers at Microsoft are "droning" their life away at the beach right now.

I'm not saying "allow yourself to be miserable and bored at work," but I am saying that it's wrong to shame people for making this kind of tradeoff.

It's also wrong to assume that big companies don't have any interesting projects. You wouldn't want to work on Apple's chip design team? You don't think JPMorgan has any opportunities to work on software that has interesting scale and performance challenges? You think Ford has nothing interesting for a UX designer to do?

[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2021/01/19/why-rich-people-tend-...

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

#88

Post by ghaff »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #33
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…

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…

Early in my career, I wasted way too much energy and emotion getting upset about things that I probably couldn't change and just didn't matter. I'm not talking about just going with the flow on everything! But I did get unnecessarily upset and angry at people way more often than I should have.

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

#89

Post by tintor »

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.

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

#90

Post by raffraffraff »

roflyear wrote: post #40
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'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.

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 they're paying you anyway. But if you know your way around the incident / problem / change management processes and you know enough of the userbase, you can get 10 incident tickets created over a 1 week period, this gets picked up as a "major problem", you get pulled into the next problem review meeting and asked what can be done. You think about it, tell them you have a solution but it'll take a few weeks to build and test. And either you skip through change control because it's a production incident, or the problem management team do all the process for you.
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