[HN Gopher] Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
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Ask HN: New job at BigCo. Everything has friction
Coming from smaller companies and startups just got a job at #BigCo
in the Bay. The one thing I'm noticing is that it's miserable to
work here because EVERYTHING has friction and takes days to get
done and has to go through numerous teams and approvals just for
the simplest stuff like a new VM or an SSL cert from their own in
house CA. I get great satisfaction at work out of accomplishing
things and this is just rediculous to the point of making me
dislike working. To get anything done is emotionally exhausting.
Anyone else dealt with this? Anyone have any type of jobs where
friction is minimal?
Author : edmcnulty101
Score : 151 points
Date : 2022-06-08 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
| brundolf wrote:
| Main reason I've always stuck to small companies. Some people are
| fine with that BigCo environment, but some of us just need
| something else
| mattlondon wrote:
| 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 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 etc etc
| jacobyoder wrote:
| > 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).
| mattlondon wrote:
| Sounds shitty - when there are personal
| relationships/nepotism/etc going on and it is impacting what
| gets done, then that is a major red flag for so many reasons.
| This time it sounds like someone gets to do what they want
| with database in production, but there can be so much more
| going on that is simply unseen, but could be much more odious
| (running the gamut from covering-up/ignoring harassment,
| right through to fraud or other criminality).
|
| Regardless, I'd probably argue that a company with only 2400
| employees let alone engineers is not what most people would
| consider "BigCo". In my mind, BigCo are thousands/tens-of-
| thousands of engineers - think FAANG, major Investment Banks,
| major technology companies (e.g. the IBMs, Microsofts, or
| Samsungs of the world). The sort of places that people
| (rightly or wrongly) aspire to work at, or at least have some
| common mind-share amongst the average person on the street.
| aadilmaan wrote:
| As an organization scales and grows, the layers through which
| decision making is required inevitable increase. Now, that
| doesn't mean you have to accept this. You have found yourself in
| an opportune place where you can have impact and reduce some of
| the overhead. BUT, be warned, you can never fully eliminate
| overhead. That is the cost of growth and BigCo status.
| throwbigdata wrote:
| 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 for drones.
| fivre wrote:
| Survivorship bias is a thing :)
|
| For every 1 person who got a big payout, there are 99 more that
| just worked themselves to burnout and maybe got a mediocre
| options payout worth about 1/2 the salary they'd have made at
| BigCo.
|
| This is probably more true if you're employee number <10 and
| stick with it through the long haul, which may not be appealing
| for a variety of reasons. It can also be true if you spin a
| personal project into a business, but you can do that while
| employed anywhere.
|
| There isn't any guaranteed, or IMO even likely expectation of a
| big reward if you join SmallCo and simply "work hard". The
| reward for that is usually more that higher-ups recognize
| you're capable and choose you as the go-to person any time they
| have any sort of tough problem. This is both exhausting and
| frustrating if you're the designated hero fixer but cannot
| convince leadership of broader changes they need to make to
| limit the number of fires that need fighting or train other
| employees to handle tasks as effectively as you. The general
| rule that you'll most likely see a salary increase by hopping
| jobs anyway still applies.
| jmschlmrs wrote:
| I your case, was the fortune a product of starting your own
| company or working at a smaller one?
| dangus wrote:
| 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-...
| Element_ wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space
| sorokod wrote:
| Friction is just something that comes along with the size of the
| org. It has matching lubricant - politics.
| rdoherty wrote:
| 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 the
| infrastructure that thousands of engineers need (or be willing to
| spend millions of dollars for SaaS). I can think of only a few
| large tech companies with low friction (Google, Netflix, Meta),
| and they spend a lot on tooling.
|
| There's a few ways to deal with it. What I noticed was that the
| 'effective' engineers would avoid the standard process and be
| 'noisy'. They were comfortable asking directly via chat or in
| person for what they wanted instead of filing tickets or having
| meetings. They used their relationships (which they did work to
| build) to skip the line and save time.
|
| You also need some kind of perspective change at large companies.
| You've moved from rowing your own boat to a battleship. Process
| is there for protection from rogue employees wreaking havoc on
| the system, not to make you move fast. Think of it from a manager
| or platform team's perspective. How do you manage over 1,000 SSL
| certs (and renew them)? Prevent VM proliferation that needs to be
| accounted for and secured? Certainly it can all be automated, but
| at a BigCo's scale, that is a 4-5 person job, and that team is
| competing with other 'revenue generating' teams for headcount.
|
| I would also recommend to give it some time. You will adjust and
| learn over time how to work more effectively. I noticed after a
| few years that I could grease the wheels a bit because I had
| spent time cultivating relationships with various teams.
|
| Good luck!
| tintor wrote:
| 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.
| is-is-odd wrote:
| How big is the co?
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I have worked in tech for two very large companies, both fortune
| 100, and well over 50k employees. I also worked for a small
| company that I could best describe as a late stage startup that
| was coming to terms with being a lifestyle business.
|
| The trick to escaping bureaucracy is the same for both. Making
| friends with people, and talking to them directly when you need
| to massage the processes. It's just that it is much easier to be
| friends with 50 people than 5000. Working from home can be an
| issue, make sure to video chat when you can and goto as many
| official and unofficial events as you can.
|
| If you have a good manager, and your manager has a good manager,
| they should have contacts around the company that can help with
| the red tape. Never abuse it, and when you're in a situation
| where your urge is to be a roadblock to another team, go out of
| your way to help them instead. It always comes back in a good
| way.
|
| Office politics sucks, but it's the only way to stay sane in
| these environments.
|
| Sometimes you have to remember that the friction is because they
| just don't know any better, or because they do no better, but
| they're too busy or too tired to create a better system. They are
| all dealing with the same nonsense, and it is soul crushing.
|
| In my current job, I had managed to skirt a lot of the corporate
| nonsense for a long time, but we merged with a company that had a
| very by-the-book culture, and my manager had to resign for health
| reasons. Things have been downhill for the past few years, and if
| I could get a job making the same at a company that didn't do all
| that, I would probably take it.
|
| ..but that brings me to another point, I loved that small
| company, like family. Then One day a bunch of my friends were
| fired for personal/political reasons. I left a year or so later,
| and a year after that they sold the company, and a year after
| that the new company closed the office and just kept the data
| center. The point is that bigger companies are more stable, if
| you have a mortgage or kids it's really no choice.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Not gonna lie, I work for a big ISP and I've given up on
| improving anything. At least I guess you're handsomely paid,
| which I can't say.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| Ah, fond memories. At the worst place, it was 5 weeks before I
| could log into a computer. Then daily "scrum" conference calls
| with 40 people on 3 continents, which took about 90 minutes each.
| Detailed written proposals (Word docs, multiple pages) required
| for every code change, even small fixes.
|
| Minimal friction is the opposite scenario - be a contractor, take
| whole jobs, do it all yourself. I prefer it, but there's no
| coasting.
| naet wrote:
| I'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 the billing of this VM
| directly, or monitor for any changes in usage or pricing, etc,
| but somebody in your organization will.
|
| I often have to own and manage the SSL certs on dozens of
| unrelated properties... and own and address all the front end
| issues in every framework... and all the ci/cd issues for every
| legacy codebase... and anything else I want I gotta do. I also
| have to properly research all providers and price tiers and
| budget it all for my clients and then sell them on any service I
| consider worth it.
| [deleted]
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Read "Orbiting the Giant Hairball" and see if it resonates.
| ageitgey wrote:
| 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 thousands of people productive. They might individually be
| less productive, but as a whole they accomplish more than a small
| company can accomplish. Some do it better than others, but no big
| company works like a small company.
|
| That's just how it is. It's easier to solve problems with small
| groups of people than large groups of people. If the problem
| takes a large group of people, it will be a lot less efficient.
|
| I would even say that working at a big company as essentially a
| different skillset than working at a start-up or small company.
| In a big company, your main job is to get other people to do
| things and you are successful based on how well you can do that.
| In a small company, your job is to do things yourself.
|
| If you really hate the big company world, you should consider
| moving back to a small company. It's never going to not be like
| that.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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 (and to
| inform stakeholders, the field, etc.) was a huge ongoing
| effort.
| rsstack wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| rsstack wrote:
| > 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) :)
| wedn3sday wrote:
| Part of the difficulty you're dealing with is just learning how a
| new system works. There are reasons for this friction, you really
| dont want your inhouse CA to mess up and issue an invalid cert,
| you want to make sure that each of your several thousand VMs are
| running the correct up-to-date OS and are on the correct
| hardware. Once you've learned how to negotiate the new
| environment a lot of this "friction" will be less painful.
| jacobyoder wrote:
| Lots of advice of "just grin and bear it", and "get along"...
| etc.
|
| IMO, it depends on the friction. If this is just your own
| expectations not being met... you can adjust those.
|
| If, however, you have other people on your team or people you
| answer to expecting things to be faster, but other parts of the
| system are working against you... that seems to be a recipe for
| constant pain/friction, unless/until others leave/change (which
| you generally have no control over).
|
| Things that should take 2 hrs taking 2 weeks are
| annoying/frustrating on their own. If you have other people
| setting deadlines for you which don't align with the processes
| you're tied to - that's a whole other level of pain, and it might
| be worth trying to find someplace a bit less internally
| conflicted.
| kitd wrote:
| What you call friction is usually a symptom of process. BigCos
| use process to protect themselves from stress and failure. When
| things go wrong at BigCo, it often hits the news and can affect
| the livelihoods of a large number of people and cost millions.
| Process is designed to stop that happening.
|
| In contrast, few people notice if SmallCo's website is down for a
| while or a bill isn't paid.
|
| Having worked at both Big and SmallCo, the stress/salary rate is
| usually much lower in BigCo thanks to that process, so, assuming
| you want to carry on working there, embrace the process and
| understand that (most of) it is your friend.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Part of the beauty of BigCo is you are being paid to deal with
| the inefficiency. You have two options sit back, rest and vest or
| try and streamline things (often a political rather than
| technical endeavor).
|
| Both can be lucrative journeys.
| jrockway wrote:
| I think the key here is to make sure you minimize these costs.
| For example, if you decide to make a microservice every time you
| want some independently-useful feature, you'll have to set up CI,
| get a domain name, get an internal cert, get permission to route
| packets at production priority, have a privacy review, get a
| launch review, etc. If that's the org, then you never want to be
| making a microservice. Shove everything into your monolith (and
| hey, maybe let other teams do that too and share some of the
| operational burden). Be adaptable; find the processes that are
| time consuming and make sure that you only go through them once.
| Make sure that if you impose process, it has value.
|
| The other side of the coin is that all these processes exist for
| a reason. If an outage costs you a billion dollars, it's
| financially great if you're filling out paperwork and having
| meetings instead of checking in features that break production.
|
| The key is to be adaptable. Observe what is a necessary waste of
| time, and get it done and out of the way. Observe what is an
| unnecessary use of time, and work around it. And, accept that you
| can't always win. Sometimes it's socially imperative to do
| something that's objectively a waste of time (status meetings),
| so you have to do it.
|
| (Why do they make it so hard to get work done at big companies?
| No idea. I could never go back. Not being productive at work
| isn't worth the extra money they pay you. Kind of sad when you
| think about it.)
| llaolleh wrote:
| The startups and small companies are playing offense - they are
| trying to get their foot in the door and hunting.
|
| BigCos are playing defense - they want to maintain the status quo
| and not kill the golden goose. They've built a castle to protect
| it. It's only natural that they will add friction everywhere for
| the fear of killing the damn bird.
|
| Relax and coast for a bit, and jump to a small company. But like
| others have said, you will work more hours, and they can be
| insanely high cognitive load for other reasons.
| polygotdomain wrote:
| I had worked at smaller shops, then took what I thought was going
| to be a next big step at a company who's mascot is a reptile.
| Friction EVERYWHERE. The TLDR was that I left after 5 months and
| that company was the most unhappy I've been in my career.
|
| When I started, I had a single monitor machine that didn't have
| Visual Studio installed. I was told I'd have to wait till the
| next budget cycle for a second monitor. I didn't get Visual
| Studio installed for 3 WEEKS and no one seemed to care. I'm not
| sure why they thought it was fine for a six figure developer to
| basically be sitting idle for 3 weeks, but that attitude was
| basically the norm.
|
| When I actually got coding, everything was road blocks. Policies
| and procedures everywhere. No one had time to explain anything.
| Everything had to be submitted through a ticketing system. It was
| just bad. Daily standups where I just made up BS because they'd
| barely given me anything to work on, and no one seemed to care.
|
| The thing was that when I looked forward at my team lead, my
| manager, etc., who in theory would've been my next steps at the
| company I'd have to jump through ridiculous hoops just to get
| into those positions, and they all fundamentally had very little
| power. They were still at the bottom tier middle managers, and
| the BS policies, procedures, and technology decisions all got
| handed down from managers above them.
|
| I couldn't deal with the environment, but from my coworkers who
| were there, I got the sense from them that they just accepted
| things. Progress was slow, jump through the hoops you're told to
| jump through, but by in large, it was steady well paying work
| that they could just check out at the end of the day. No harm in
| that, but it just felt like my career would just stagnate there,
| and I'd find it very hard to get out once I got comfortable with
| it. I planned on sticking around till 6 months, then looking. I
| wound up starting to reply back to recruiters earlier and was out
| in 5. Best decision I made was leaving.
| karmakaze wrote:
| > accomplishing things
|
| [I also ended up at a BigCo along with others from a small
| startup that pivoted multiple times after making v1 products that
| could have been successful.]
|
| What I learned is to reframe expectations. At the startup, I
| could develop software and features rapidly with no impediments
| than my own lack of knowledge in an area. At the BigCo, the
| product is large, changes are slow, and processes are safe. The
| payoff though is that when you do ship that feature, it's being
| used by thousands-to-millions more users than it would have been
| at the startup.
|
| At the same time, all the one-off things I used to do at the
| startup should have been streamlined at the BigCo so that I can
| think primarily about the problem I'm trying to solve and not the
| peripheral routine elements of every service that gets shipped.
| If this is not the case, perhaps the BigCo's processes are not
| very well streamlined.
|
| I've found some ways to adapt, but some things still take much
| longer than they _should_ , like PR reviews (but I'm also guilty
| of being a slow reviewer).
|
| > emotionally exhausting
|
| This is because you have an expectation that a certain thing
| _should_ only take a certain amount of time and effort.
|
| The best general advice is to work on multiple things
| concurrently, so that when one thing has delays you can switch to
| another one that's ready for work.
|
| You have to decide whether you want to actively improve these
| inefficient processes, accept them, adapt, or move on. Anything
| else will be suffering. If you move to another BigCo the
| annoyances will be different more to your liking, or not.
| joaogui1 wrote:
| It has friction because you're not working in a vacuum, pun
| intended. The more people you're working with, the more
| friction/overhead there is. The trick is trying to automate as
| much of it as possible, and to batch what's impossible to
| automate
| mikesabbagh wrote:
| I see it as a game. The startup environment is level 1 of the
| game. you learn about VMs and how to start them. At BigCo, this
| is level 5 or 10. Nothing is easy, to start a VM you have to make
| sure your system is compliant, the ip is restricted from some
| countries, the linux version is LTS and bla bla bla
|
| To keep your sanity, make sure to have a personal side project
| where you can do things fast
| sdoering wrote:
| Warning: personal rant first, maybe helpful point of view at the
| end:
|
| _rantish story_
|
| I work at a BIG Co (think 700k+ global employees) and we work for
| other Big(ish) Co as more or less data & code wrangling
| consultants.
|
| How did I end here? I worked for a small(ish) agency with around
| 500 people. We moved fast, we build cool stuff, we already to
| worked for the Big Companies and Banks in our market (Germany).
| We were at a point were quite a few more formal processes would
| have been necessary to put into place to fulfill compliance
| regulations of different markets (think banking or automotive -
| these require a lot of stuff in terms of compliance from their
| vendors).
|
| But we got lucky (?) and bought because BIG Co was not able to
| build their own agency - so they bought a lot of agencies to
| build a new one.
|
| In the "good ol' days" I knew whom to ask to get anything done.
| There was an official process and the ones in the know knew how
| to navigate the short cut. Ask the right person, receive special
| treatment and be on your way flying fast.
|
| OK - it made the process longer for the lowlies who didn't know
| the right people. And that is exactly the problem. There already
| was a two class society of workers. Because we already were too
| big for "no process" and too small for BIG Co process (and that
| drags us down nowadays). But the people following the process
| unbeknown to them got blocked by us knowing the shortcut.
|
| So yeah - it feels shitty and slow and probably as if someone
| wants to gauge ones eyeballs out with a hot branding iron.
|
| _maybe helpful POV_
|
| But think of it like this:
|
| Try to transport a 20 foot container on a high power speed boat.
| The speed boat will be way faster, more agile, more flexible. But
| if a somewhat bigger wave appears it will crash. And it will also
| not be able to deliver that much impact (containers) as the big
| ship once it arrives in the harbor.
| csours wrote:
| This is why they pay you. If they are not paying you enough, well
| ... you'll come to some conclusion.
|
| The risk to a small company is that the product will not make
| money, impressions don't convert, and the runway runs out.
|
| The risk to established companies is every other risk - software
| license risk, security risks, etc, etc, etc.
|
| Big Co also runs some or all IT as a cost center - people don't
| get to make the product better, it's difficult to staff
| appropriately for the work load.
|
| Big Co also treats people as cogs to churn out some "work" -
| management at the top cannot understand or help with every
| project, so they have tools to understand what hours are spent on
| which project. Then they expect those tools to tell them
| something useful, so they hound the middle managers based on the
| work recorded in the tools. "You manage what you measure"
|
| Friction is minimal when your job is very repeatable, or when you
| don't actually try to do anything.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Big Companies don't often have the same speed in terms of cross
| departmental (and sometimes cross team) efforts. Anything that
| basically splits between your immediate team and everything else
| has process involved, for many many reasons, one of the biggest
| being work tracking (Jira Tickets and the like) so that everyone
| else's time is accounted for to handle that task.
|
| Once you realize its all about work tracking, basically, it
| becomes either more of a hurdle or easier to understand and
| manage, but thats basically what you're up against here.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| foobarian wrote:
| Perhaps not all BigCos are the same? Mine is by no means a
| startup but stuff like internal SSL certs and similar are mostly
| self-service and instantaneous. On the other hand if you wanted
| to delete an unused parameter on a revenue-impacting code path
| you'd be in for a fun couple of quarters.
| matt_s wrote:
| I left BigCo that was not in the bay or tech and am at small_co
| (<500 people). I think its just a matter of the size of company
| and make-up of engineering org.
|
| If work is broken out to specialized teams (SSL certs, scans,
| security stuff - team A, VM's and storage - team B,
| networking/firewalls - team C, etc.) there will be friction,
| doesn't matter if its some cool company or some boring Fortune
| 500 company making farm equip.
|
| You should be able to figure out the scale of friction with
| interview questions like "say a new project spins up to build a
| web+mobile app/CRUD/SQL and needs servers - walk me through how
| many teams+time it takes to get servers up and running where a
| dev can deploy code"
| smeagull wrote:
| I've done this, except it was big government.
|
| Pick your battles. Not only is it exhausting to make everything a
| fight, but people will appreciate it more, and be on your side
| more, if you pick only the important things to stand your ground
| on.
|
| Make friends. There will be people who feel the same way, finding
| them is usually good to get things done quickly. It can be
| important also to break down the team barriers. Requiring a
| different team to accomplish something is a big part of friction,
| and knowing individuals in those teams that get stuff done can
| help. The way to get them on side is to make their jobs easier,
| and again picking your battles and compromising are good ways to
| do this.
|
| Get buy in on big changes. So this is different from making
| friends. You need to develop people that agree that a change
| needs to happen, and on a way of making that change. I'd start
| small, with convincing Individual Contributors first,
| particularly if there are very well respected ones. Then seeking
| out management and building the case that the changes will
| improve their situation. This can be a slow process. Managers
| will appreciate it if it can seem like their project, and once it
| does, you'll have their backing because they don't want it to
| fail.
|
| All that said, there are certainly places where this sort of
| friction is minimal, usually remote devops driven start-ups or
| consultancies.
|
| I'd use buzz words also, to help make your case. The whole DevOps
| shift comes with some principles that you can wield to make the
| case that infra changes should belong in the team, and CI/CD and
| similar require that VMs (well, pods really) be spun up easily,
| and from an API.
| kosma wrote:
| Welcome to the real world. We don't have cookies, they were cut
| as a part of a cost saving package signed by the corporate.
| magicink81 wrote:
| Your position at a job dealing with friction is much more common
| than the opposite case. If you're interested in learning and
| growing, here are some opportunities you may find in your new
| role:
|
| 1) Cultivate an attitude of optimism and gratitude despite the
| challenges, perhaps through a study of Stoicism and a cultivation
| of patience via a study of Buddhism. Gain more pain tolerance.
| Learn to not care so much about the outcomes, and care more about
| your own presence and the excellence of your contribution. Learn
| to care more about other people, rather than just getting the job
| done. Learn to have more fun, while also "digging the digital
| ditch". Being calm and steady despite feeling uncomfortable is an
| invaluable life skill essential to growth and doing big things.
|
| 2) Learn to politic. Recommended reading (and there is a lot)
| would be How to Win Friends and Influence People, as well as
| Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power. Navigating people and
| political systems is also an invaluable life skill and essential
| to growth and going big things.
|
| 3) Develop your life outside of work more fully. Consider getting
| more involved in helping your family, your friends, and your
| community. Volunteer opportunities abound. Perhaps they need a
| speedy hacker like you to help them with some part of their tech?
|
| 4) Study the challenges of BigCo for startup opportunities. Lots
| of startups are created by people who ran into a big challenge at
| a big co, then broke out on their own to solve the problem, then
| were able to grow by selling back to their previous employers to
| solve the problems with tech.
| javajosh wrote:
| 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.
| SheinhardtWigCo wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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 fast, you could upset the cash cow, hence the
| friction placed in front of you. But this can work in your favor.
| Excellence will not be expected of you at BigCo, and if anyone
| complains about why nothing is getting done, you just repeat
| exactly why. As long as the company is making money and you
| haven't made any enemies, the chances of you getting fired are
| slim to none.
|
| IMO, you have to look at the big picture. If you ignore the
| friction factor, is life at BigCo so bad? Are your hours
| reasonable? Do you like your coworkers? Good pay? Learning to let
| go your frustration with how you think the company should be run
| may be the most favorable choice. Remember, _all jobs suck_ ,
| more or less. A year after you change companies, you _will_ find
| things to hate about that one as well.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| 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 channeling your ambition into your own projects,
| hobbies, and interests. If I'd spent more time making my own
| game engine rather than working on theirs, I'd still have it
| today.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| snakey wrote:
| OP, I'm also a twenty something that moved from a fast paced
| start-up to a Behemoth.
|
| It's been 7 months so far and throughout the first 6 months,
| I have fought and resisted how BigCo operates--it left me
| tired and even more miserable. Within the last month however,
| I have stumbled across the same advice as has been given by
| the wise members above. This advice is invaluable, accept
| that within these organisations a lot is outside of your
| control. Rather, focus on projects, learning and hobbies
| outside of your work that bring you joy.
|
| If your feelings remain unchanged within a couple of months
| to a year then consider making a change to another Co. Good
| or bad, these experiences are invaluable in helping us to
| decide on how we wish to pursue our careers.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| This is a great comment. I urge OP to take this on board
|
| Look at the lifers at BigCo, and how they roll with it. They
| choose their battles carefully, they don't fight the system.
| They are good colleagues, and they are paid well for their long
| service. They also go home on time!
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Not disagreeing but you can't just give up and coast along
| either. Don't get me wrong, I've been doing it for a couple of
| years and getting ready to quit my job because of it. It gets
| frustrating and a tool that's not used frequently loses its
| edge.
|
| I'd say do a couple of things -
|
| a) Provide constructive recommendations on the specific
| friction points. Sometimes, especially coming from a small
| company background, you fail to realize the need for a process
| or review. It doesn't mean it can't be improved but resist the
| immediate urge to hate it.
|
| b) Plan ahead. Once you get familiar with how the processes
| work, set aside time to raise request before you actually need
| the resource. I was terrible at this and it came to bite me
| many times. Anticipate and plan ahead.
| bdcravens wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I work for a very small "non-tech" company, have been here 12
| years, and have a great income. The tradeoff I had to make was
| a much higher level of responsibility. (I'm at the very top of
| the tech stack - if something isn't working, there's no one for
| me to blame, aside from a vendor like AWS)
| jerDev wrote:
| Lesser pay is not always true.
| closeparen wrote:
| 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
| service mesh, etc. where all of that is handled automatically.
|
| Make sure there's not a golden path that you're missing? Or
| that your reasons for departing from it are _really_
| insurmountable?
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| 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)
| roflyear wrote:
| 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.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| 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.
| daveevad wrote:
| > 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.
| mring33621 wrote:
| I have worked at 2 really big banks and they have many very
| talented, well-rounded people.
|
| The friction is there to protect the firm.
|
| It's true, though, that upper leadership tends to be
| incompetent. Don't hire them.
|
| But finance tech VPs and ExecDirs are often highly skilled,
| smart people.
| xchaotic wrote:
| A lot of the friction in the banks is for legal reasons -
| they HAVE to abide by certain protocols. If you treat that
| as an extra challenge rather than a hindrance it will be
| more rewarding.
| mirntyfirty wrote:
| I think that working at a bank is fantastic so long as a
| person can internalize the good parts.
|
| The bank I was at had the best data practices of any company
| I've worked at by a mile. They wouldn't hesitate to write
| huge checks to make sure that the hardware systems and teams
| supporting those systems were perfect. Software management
| was a bit procedural but the results were consistent and high
| quality.
| mk89 wrote:
| 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.
| mring33621 wrote:
| I have worked at several big companies, including
| BigFatHugeBank and heartily agree with the above comment.
| nonfamous wrote:
| 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 and slow, and you'll work it all out.
| toss1 wrote:
| 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.
| bavell wrote:
| > A saying I heard from Africa: "If you want to go fast, go
| alone, if you want to go far, go together".
|
| Love this! Definitely gonna use this sometime.
| barnabee wrote:
| 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, and it's absolutely worth selectively breaking the
| rules, I'm not sure you'll ever be as happy as you could be in
| a different environment if that's how you feel now.
| mbesto wrote:
| > 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 and its called the US Corporation._
|
| _On a risk adjusted basis, you 're better off working at a Big
| Corporation_
| taurath wrote:
| > 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
| mbesto wrote:
| Also probably true.
| moomin wrote:
| One trick I've used is quite simply having five things on at
| once. You keep notes of where each project is, and work to get
| each one blocked. When they get unblocked, you switch to that
| thing until it's blocked again.
|
| There will be people who insist that you should "focus on the
| most important thing" but if it's blocked what's the point?
|
| The other thing to do is make a lot of friends in related
| departments. It's amazing how much faster things will go when
| someone does you a favour. Expect to be doing favours in return.
| zwischenzug wrote:
| I wrote a post on this topic:
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.container-solutions.com/wh...
|
| Based on moving from a technology company of 700 to a bank of
| 120000
| ryandrake wrote:
| There was another thread[1] a few months ago with a very similar
| question. I'm not going to cut and paste my reply[2] here, but it
| applies to this question too I think. TLDR: There are very good
| reasons everything has friction and requires approval--they're
| not doing it just to be ridiculous.
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639486
|
| 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29644628
| acomjean wrote:
| I've been at big companies and really small startups. I've tended
| to alternate between them.
|
| My Big Company experience was they broke us up into smallish
| teams (6-20 people), which made us work more like a small company
| in many respects. There was a lot of process, but it was actually
| a good discipline to have. (Its always startling when I started
| in academia the "code repo" was CVS and not hardly used..)
|
| My big company code was more thoroughly reviewed and frankly
| better.. I learned a lot from those reviews and being given the
| time to design before coding. Having to do it all at a small
| company you learn a lot too. Big companies actually measured
| productivity, and had a processes.. Much less input into what we
| were going to do.
|
| Though it wasn't all great: I was put on the "Morale Committee"
| because morale was low. This didn't help my Morale, but we did
| get the company to do some ice-cream socials.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| I mean, I have a similar experience, where I can be demotivated
| because I took a summer to deploy a website which has one button
| on it, and a service to write a bit when the button is pushed.
|
| I felt like I could have built out the project in a weekend with
| php, and I don't even know much php.
|
| But then, in the "productionalization step" there was a lot of
| leverage from being at bigCo. I could get it internationalized
| super easily. I got security, encryption keys, done. I got a
| hostname with a few clicks. I got redundant deployments, and
| separate release / dev environments. I have metrics and
| monitoring. My DB is backed up and region sharded and all kinds
| of stuff I don't care about. Users can delete their accounts and
| my db can get purged.
|
| So building the "demo" version felt a lot slower, but
| transitioning it to the production version was a lot faster than
| me working on my own.
| riskneutral wrote:
| > Anyone else dealt with this?
|
| I imagine that the majority of white collar workers are employed
| by large corporations, and so the majority have to deal with
| this.
|
| Given the number of startup layoffs happening, I imagine a lot of
| people will be having their first experience with large corporate
| bureaucracy.
|
| > To get anything done is emotionally exhausting.
|
| Onboarding as a new hire is usually the most frustrating period,
| because you need to request a lot of things and can't get any
| work done in the meantime. Eventually you have enough access that
| you can at least do work while waiting on other requests.
|
| One thing that helps is knowing how to use the corporate tracking
| system to know which individual specifically the request is stuck
| on, and then relentlessly following up with that individual via
| email until they approve your request.
|
| You should also track your tasks and identify the ones that are
| stalled because you're waiting on a request, and then regularly
| show the list to your manager (along with your follow up
| efforts). That way you have a solid reason for not getting those
| tasks completed.
| honkler wrote:
| serious question: why do you want to "get work done"? You are
| getting paid regardless. Maybe take time out and work on an
| open source project. Maybe do consulting on the side. Read a
| book or something, perhaps?
| spencerflem wrote:
| I feel like it's not ridiculous to want to have the single
| biggest part of your life be _for_ something.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| You go to work for money,not for something. Otherwise you
| would be busy doing charitable stuff.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Yeah, and it sucks. I'd much rather be doing something
| charitable.
| ardit33 wrote:
| Accept the fact that it takes a lot longer to do anything at a
| big co. Also, accept the fact that whatever you do, is not
| crucial to the company as you are just another engineer out of
| thousands. Hence, why the rush?
|
| If you feel creatively constrained, try to do a fun project so
| you can learn new things. But don't through away a good job just
| because it takes long to do anything.
| jerDev wrote:
| I am too authentic to work at FAANG. My salary as staff eng. is
| roughly equivalent but I can argue, throw a fit, change
| direciton, say my opinion etc etc every day. I push through
| friction, I ignore managers, I do things my way. I ask for
| forgiveness not permission because I have a bias for action not
| confirmation.
|
| Software engineering interviews do not value authenticity,
| typically. They want you to say what they want to hear. I
| purposely go in the opposite direction. I am always myself, say
| how I feel, and challenge the interviewer.
|
| My girlfriend ( soon to be wife ) has no issues getting any job
| she wants in software engineering. She will recite exactly the
| words they want to hear, and they love her. I will say exactly
| what I want to say in an interview and they will love or hate me.
| I have no intention of changing.
|
| My best advice? Leave for a smaller company that lets you do
| whatever you want to do and perform at an exceptional level. You
| get the same satisfaction, same pay, and you may only be 1 step
| down from VP. You can grab VP's, C's for a comment, you can do
| whatever you want ( as long as you perform ).
|
| That's the way. For me at least.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| Interesting 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 production service, a large-scale service, or
| both.
|
| Requests for a new repo or Confluence space are fulfilled same
| day and give me complete admin control over it. I can kickoff
| custom OS builds and generation of installation images via a
| self-service portal. I can create new email-enabled LDAP groups
| via self-service. I decide if the group itself is self-add or
| not, etc. Anyone else in the company can do the same. Many other
| things are as simple as direct manager approval.
|
| You don't have to put up with bureaucratic nonsense, it just
| happens to be common in corporate America where management
| doesn't trust the peons to make decisions. Or perhaps where
| everything is driven by division P&L so no one wants to be
| responsible for spending money outside their fiefdom?
|
| I prefer an environment where individuals have responsibility and
| yet where we accept mistakes will be made. As long as you learn
| from a mistake and don't continuously repeat it there is no need
| for a new process in response to it.
| lmz wrote:
| Sometimes the people are paranoid, but what you describe is
| only possible if the company has spent the time to build that
| kind of tooling that allows for flexibility for peons while
| also limiting blast radius.
| honkler wrote:
| Can there be a better display of first world (actually SF bay)
| problems than this post by OP?
|
| All Over the world, workers yearn for breathing time - A few
| minutes away from the the production line. They wish their tool
| breaks and the management takes a long while to provide a
| replacement.
|
| What's your issue, op? You seem very excited to generate
| shareholder profit.
| closeparen wrote:
| Put another way, software engineers are some of the few people
| afforded a healthy relationship with their labor - to take
| pride in its craftsmanship, to be satisfied by things working
| well and dissatisfied by things working poorly. That is cause
| for gratitude and celebration.
|
| This kind of oppositional attitude is toxic. I'm glad not to
| find it in my coworkers. And I would not accept an environment
| where coworkers displayed it.
| wussboy wrote:
| It's not wrong to enjoy your work. This person's experiences
| are real to them, and they have the right to feel them.
|
| If only the most unfortunate person in the world can claim
| injustice or dissatisfaction, if only their problem can be
| solved, progress will grind to a halt.
| honkler wrote:
| If they have the right to their experiences, I have right to
| provide my opinion on their experiences. And let's be honest,
| if their way of life makes it worse for the rest of the
| world, it's perfectly okay to publicly shame even.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| OP didn't say you didn't have the right, OP merely shared
| their opinion on your opinion of someone's experiences.
| spencerflem wrote:
| Agreed that purely generating shareholder profit is not
| worthwhile. It does suck to be forced to spend a lot of time
| doing something both painful and meaningless tho. Something
| psychological there
| honkler wrote:
| dkarp wrote:
| Problem is you're normally still judged by what you deliver, so
| you can't just chill and wait for things to get done
| honkler wrote:
| no, not really. You are judged _relative_ to others. And
| others aren 't producing crap ton in this sort of
| environment.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| i'm always baffled at the amount of effort it took pass the
| interview vs how easy it is to actually coast in this job
| and yes, you need to do just enough to keep pace with your
| peers.
| striking wrote:
| Feeling like you're constantly blocked isn't fun either.
| Starting to get into the groove only to have to immediately
| stop, having to keep track of lots of threads where people put
| up roadblocks to justify their own jobs, etc. is not "a few
| minutes away from the production line". It's work all the same,
| and not the work most engineers sign up to do.
| honkler wrote:
| During that while, what stops you from reading a book,
| working on a consulting project on the side (thanks, WFH),
| learn some new skill? Life is more than serving your boss in
| the office.
| closeparen wrote:
| I'm not serving my boss. My boss has a whole set of metrics
| and expectations that are quite distinct from delivering
| working software to customers; I use my considerable
| autonomy as a white-collar worker to half-ass those behind
| her back and spend my energies on what is actually
| satisfying to me, which is to craft good systems and make
| things work well. And as the sibling comment mentions, this
| is a lot more interesting when there are real customers and
| stakes.
| striking wrote:
| There are still targets to be met and demands still being
| made of you. Sure, if you have nothing to do, do something
| good with your time; that's not always the position people
| are in.
|
| > Life is more than serving your boss in the office.
|
| Sure, I don't think anyone's saying you exist to serve your
| boss. But if you have to work a job, why not find one you
| actually like doing? I think what the OP describes would be
| a complete drain of my energy, even if I could read a book
| occasionally; working on actual code during my workday
| gives me an opportunity to be paid to learn new things and
| is honestly actually energizing. Why work on a tiny Nix
| environment on a toy project when I could be setting up a
| real-world Nix development environment that's deployed
| across tens of developer laptops, y'know?
| jeffwask wrote:
| 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.
| loandigger wrote:
| 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.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This is why I work at ~20 people startups.
|
| Occasionally, these jobs end suddenly, but I gladly accept that
| risk.
| ge96 wrote:
| Felt the same at an org (~$30B) I worked at (non-faang). Ended up
| leaving after two years, did a startup (greenfield/build whatever
| for mvp, fun/learned a lot/sweat-equity) that didn't succeed,
| broke, got back into regular job.
|
| For me it was the SDLC part... as in a seemingly small feature
| would take 2 weeks to get done because you needed to: create a
| TDD read me that described what you were going to do, how, unit
| tests involved, side effects, etc... then write the code, unit
| tests, PR, write more integration testing, PR... get it into a
| package to be released. But later on I realized that is
| standard/how to maintain large applications.
|
| Also the other thing that is not as fun is your job is very
| small/specific I found at the first place I was at. I didn't
| touch the build pipeline, didn't work with containers, I just
| wrote front end code basically.
| irrational wrote:
| I 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 hell. Our productivity
| took an insane nosedive. As you said, it is slow as molasses to
| get anything done and everything requires so many (SO MANY!)
| meetings. At first this was very stressful, but eventually I just
| gave up. Whereas before I could get in a good 30 hours of
| productive work done a week (meetings are rarely productive), now
| I am lucky to get 5 hours of productive work done. Instead I
| spend the majority of my time in meetings or waiting for people
| to get back to me. 2 things help. First I work on personal
| projects in all the downtime. Second I started as an online
| instructor at a university teaching web development to students.
| So I spend time helping the students. And the company is
| perfectly happy with my work, since nobody else can get anything
| done either. It's insane, but I learned to just let it go. If the
| company doesn't care about how much productivity they are losing,
| why should I care?
| itronitron wrote:
| It's easier to ask forgiveness than beg for permission. And if
| you look at the rules and systems closely enough you can find an
| assortment of gaps through which you can operate without having
| to ask for either.
| slipwalker wrote:
| > Anyone else dealt with this?
|
| welcome to corporate world, AKA the meat grinder.... it's all
| about: _" just because you( your work, actually ) are necessary,
| doesn't mean you ( your work ) are important"_. Just collect the
| checks ( i hope they are fat ) and "go through the motions". By
| the time you grow really sick of everything, let's hope you have
| saved/invested enough money to be really close to (early)
| retirement.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| Not only does everything have friction, most of it is by design
| to keep other less talented people in jobs.
|
| If it's truly unpleasant, then try to be that guy who can "make a
| few calls" and get stuff pushed through a small bit quicker.
| Pander to the egos you'll encounter, hop to their beat until you
| get things done because fighting it will just end up taking
| longer.
| lhorie wrote:
| The big difference between large companies and small companies is
| that large companies prize specialization. The way to thrive at a
| big company isn't to be the person that sets up the entire stack
| for the company, it's by finding value in deep obscure corners of
| very specific niches and smoothly rolling out that value to
| orders of magnitude more people than you would had impacted with
| a package of full stack decisions in a smaller company.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Days? It once took me 4 months to have a package manager
| installed that was blocking a project. Defense software
| engineering is a whole other level of misery.
|
| I left defense and I'm now in a BigCo. and loving life because
| things only take days at most. Appreciate what you have?
| tomwheeler wrote:
| This is my experience in defense as well. After my proposal for
| a talk at a software conference was accepted, I found out that
| the estimated date for getting the required content review from
| Corporate Communications, Legal, and InfoSec was several weeks
| later than the conference itself. In practice, though, a
| thoughtful VP up the management chain recognized that this was
| a problem and fast-tracked it.
| coding123 wrote:
| Friction is usually caused by reactive policies. Pain causes
| reaction. Pain like a customer complaint, or accidental data
| deletion. It usually causes red tape or people that got chewed
| out from allowing certain changes. It's good and it's bad. It's
| obviously good because there will be fewer customer complaints.
| But it's bad because the product does not evolve fast anymore -
| which may cause fewer customers long term.
| yakak wrote:
| 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.
| starwind wrote:
| I've always done well at big companies because I'm good at going
| around and talking to people trying to smooth the friction.
| Consider looking at the friction like some detective work and the
| opportunity to get some exercise
| valbaca wrote:
| > I get great satisfaction at work out of accomplishing things
| and this is just rediculous to the point of making me dislike
| working.
|
| Welcome to BigCo. That's all there is.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| So far I have found the key to being efficient in this type of
| environment is to have many things on the go at once.
|
| You are used to things having few dependencies so you can focus
| on one task and take it to completion. Now there are many
| dependencies and so you have lots of downtime. You can use this
| downtime to set other things in to motion.
| kshahkshah wrote:
| Yes, many of us have dealt with this as you can see from the
| existing comments.
|
| One thing you are mentioning is the friction around the dev
| experience however and there is perhaps an action you can take,
| if you're willing this early in your tenure there, to put your
| neck out on the line.
|
| My very firm belief is that a bad dev experience results in a
| high cost of experimentation which means people don't try new
| things out and innovation stops. The only way things get done is
| through massively coordinated efforts. If you can associate a
| cost of the gate keeping with productivity and then directly back
| to the money it costs the company, or money that could be saved,
| or feature velocity to be gained, you can make a case for
| improving the experience. Making the case and seeing this all
| through will take you 6-9 months.
| oceanswave wrote:
| What happens when you try to go fast through friction? You only
| generate heat.
| rjh29 wrote:
| I've never worked for a bigco. I work for a 100 person company
| and enjoy being able to self-start a project, create VMs and
| other resources and deploy it myself! Not sure if I could get
| used to that.
| bigtech wrote:
| There's a way to work in such an environment and not go crazy,
| but it will take time to get used to it. Think of it system with
| big asynchronous methods. You need to arrange your work to put in
| the slow running requests early, then focus on other things while
| waiting.
| Qworg wrote:
| To sound a slightly different note:
|
| Yes - there's lots of friction. Bureaucracy is inevitable, given
| the cost of turning the ship/the risk level if something bad
| sneaks through.
|
| That said, there is a ton of potential leverage at BigCo - the
| scale is extraordinary.
|
| It is a trade - you get a far bigger lever, but it takes way
| longer to pull.
| nijave wrote:
| Yup, risk is a huge differentiator. Ship a perf regression at
| startup? Who cares: hotfix and carry on. Ship a perf regression
| at #BigCo: risk massive financial impact when mega app falls
| over.
|
| Deploy a vulnerable VM at startup you configured wrong?
| Probably nobody will even notice. At #BigCo, risk an advanced
| persistent threat that's actively scanning your infra finding
| it immediately and compromising a massive amount of data.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Thank you. I've been feeling frustrated at how slow (and hard)
| it is to pull the lever, and never noticed how much more
| powerful the lever is.
| dirtybirdnj wrote:
| > 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
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Is this about the same for BigTechCos as much as BigRegularCos?
|
| I've done work for big insurance companies, "tech companies" like
| Verizon, or big soda companies, and they're as high friction as
| you'd expect. Somehow I imagined BigTechCos to use better tools
| and be nimbler on decision-making, letting employees make their
| own decisions without as much oversight.
| tonfreed wrote:
| I also work at a large company, I learned to have about 3 things
| in flight at all times because there will inevitably be a blocker
| on everything.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Sit back, and enjoy being paid to do nothing. #Friction is
| accepted at #bigco so while you can enjoy speed, they probably
| don't.
|
| The company is paying you to work to their schedule, and unless
| you're working on "efficiency" or workflow improvement - just
| take it as it is and keep on top of it with your calendar.
|
| Yeah, it's silly to file a ticket for a self signed cert, but it
| also puts the onus and responsibility on that team ,not you. Yes
| you'll miss out on small wins like that, but really - it's a cert
| in the end, and once you raise it up - let the team deal with it.
| pfortuny wrote:
| That is exactly what Big means in this context: something
| indistinguishable from bureaucracy. I am sorry for you but if you
| want to be able to work "freely" and "get things done", a big
| corporation is the worst place to work in.
|
| I am not happy to bring bad tidings.
|
| Edit: no business gets "Big" without a good paper trail and this
| implies that no action is performed unless some previous paper
| work has been carried out.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| Yeah, It's a good learning experience at least. Never worked at
| one of these. Guess I naively assumed that since it was from
| #SiliconValley it might be different.
|
| What do you think would be the best types of jobs to target for
| lower friction? Startups I guess.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Ask yourself the bigger question; what do you want out of
| life? Do you want to grind code for 80 hours a week and deal
| with 24/7 on-call rotations? Or do you want to put in your 40
| hours, collect your RSUs, and live happily ever after? There
| is more to life than work, and #BigCos make it far easier to
| enjoy that.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| I really want to do interesting enjoyable work to be
| honest.
| me_me_mu_mu wrote:
| Start your own company or work on side projects while you
| wait on administrative bullshit.
|
| Why wait? Working at big tech is a bankrolling operation.
| I show up and collect my dough, nothing less nothing
| more.
| xtracto wrote:
| I've come to prefer working in companies that are between
| Series A and Series B funding: After Series A is when the
| startups really have money for compensation. Series B is
| where companies start implementing bureaucracy like OKRs,
| permissions for everything and the org chart starts getting
| deep.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| Interesting. How can one identify what Series a company is?
| Ask during interview?
| xtracto wrote:
| Sure you can ask . Another way is lookin for the company
| through crunchbase , they often show in what series is
| the company currently.
| pfortuny wrote:
| A smaller company (not incorporated?), also.
|
| I guess a good indicator is the size of the legal Dpt.
|
| But I work at academia so I am not your best counselor on the
| topic.
|
| Notice also that you are going to learn A LOT about "due
| process" and "due diligence". This will be very useful in
| your future positions.
| sithadmin wrote:
| Size of Internal Audit team and spend on internal and
| external audit services is probably a better indicator than
| size of legal department. In most orgs the legal department
| mostly serves as a bridge between executives and outside
| council with minimal emphasis on internal compliance. IA
| departments on the other hand frequently own responsibility
| for implementation and enforcement of controls recommended
| by outside council, as well as controls imposed by non-
| voluntary regulatory frameworks like SOX and voluntary
| regulatory/risk control frameworks. The latter are
| generally the cause of a lot of the 'friction' folks are
| complaining about here.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Totally right.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Friction is a continuum. As the company gets smaller, the
| amount of friction gets lower. Also it depends on what you do
| for the company, putting a button on the front page of
| Amazon.com has more friction than putting a button on an
| internal service support tool or a test tool.
|
| That is to say Big companies can be OK if you land in the
| right department.
| camtarn wrote:
| Yes, that's probably true, but ... as somebody who actually
| put a button on the front page of Amazon.com (back in
| 2010-ish, I wrote the presentation code for an MP3 sample
| player for album recommendations) it was actually pretty
| low friction. Write code, test it locally, deploy it as an
| A/B test, test was not negative - ship it. The only people
| I had to talk to were translators for internationalization.
|
| There _was_ a team that was responsible for cohesive look-
| and-feel across the gateway (front page), but mostly they
| trusted us to do our thing.
|
| The principle of a team completely owning their little bit
| of territory within a page on the Amazon site was a very
| good one, IMO, and helped cut down on what could have been
| a bureaucratic nightmare. Of course it had its downsides:
| some teams didn't pay as much attention to presentation or
| browser compatibility or interoperability in a range of
| scenarios as others did; and by its very nature, this team
| organisation led to pages which were divided into not-
| particularly-cohesive slices, each its own little fiefdom.
|
| Still, there are some BigCorps which do at least pay
| attention to optimising processes, even if it's only in a
| particular direction. (Shipping stuff at Amazon was easy.
| Want to talk at an open source conference or ship open
| source software? ...ooh, we'd better talk to the lawyers.)
| throwaway552653 wrote:
| > Shipping stuff at Amazon was easy.
|
| This might have been true years ago, but my recent
| experience has sadly been the opposite. e.g. on the
| projects I worked involving the website, testing locally
| has been virtually impossible.
| temp_praneshp wrote:
| Do you always put random "#"s in your sentences? Is it a
| startup thing?
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| Its a hash tag. Meant to emphasize an abstract concept. A
| life variable you could say.
| itronitron wrote:
| Jobs where the people that write the software are close to
| the people that use the software tend to have fewer process
| restrictions and less red tape because there is more direct
| accountability. Science teams, applied research, and some
| data science groups are set up this way.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Mid-sized well established companies engaged in markets where
| there is active growth. You get maturity, experience, and a
| true desire for competition... and if you can move the needle
| for that type of group you will be well rewarded and you'll
| probably actually enjoy it.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| How many employees is considered mid sized? Like 200?
| datalopers wrote:
| You're not being paid to accomplish work, you're being paid to
| _not_ work for a potential competitor.
| sto_hristo wrote:
| That is what you get with already established projects and teams.
| And it's only the beginning; legacy code will follow, along with
| horrible styles and ancient practices, and it will be much worse.
|
| That is why I love startups. I gotta find me a nice startup in
| need of a sr. full stack engineer with backend emphasis.
| donohoe wrote:
| 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 was pretty obvious.
| Suddenly I had access. So far this is 3 weeks or emails.
|
| With access I realized the implementation was botched. All view
| states were being handled by a hash in the URL so all Page Views
| in GA were reported in one URL.
|
| I requested a minor code tweak to account for this. I was told by
| the dev team it would take 6-8 weeks to implement such a change.
| I was assured this was rather complex and they'd need to free up
| people too to work on it so that could take longer.
|
| I told them the code change was already written and I'd included
| it in the initial request. I referenced the template file within
| their system where they change would live and included tests.
| They still dragged their feet. It got completed in my last week.
| Copy/pasted exactly as I'd written it.
|
| It was utter madness.
| itronitron wrote:
| 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?
| pphysch wrote:
| At SmallCo, scales are small enough that most of the information
| systems exist in wetware. The boss knows each employee personally
| and where they fit, more or less. You or the VM guy _knows_ that
| the VM resources will not be abused. Relatively little is defined
| in software-backed protocol.
|
| At BigCo, there is a lot more protocol, because there has to be.
| The boss is physically incapable of knowing every employee
| personally. You are physically incapable of knowing every
| possible point where VMs might get used or abused. There needs to
| be a protocol to authorize these requests and keep a record of
| it.
|
| This is just the way it is, and you should understand and accept
| it if you want to keep working in these environments.
|
| If there are BigCo's that seem to work better, it's because they
| spend more resources on improving their protocols and processes,
| not that they magically bypassed the inherent complexity of
| running an organization of 10,000 people.
| idoh wrote:
| tl;dr - work at smaller companies in less regulated industries
|
| I'm a PM for security at a CI/CD company, and adding "friction"
| comes up as a feature request in 50%+ of calls with customers and
| prospects. As companies grow to a certain size, as a practical
| matter you can't trust employees to not do bad things. Also, in
| order to win more business you have to comply with more
| regulations. Access controls, separation of responsibilities,
| etc.
|
| Restated, one person's friction is another person's compliance.
| drachun wrote:
| 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 have been resold since, and nobody answered them when they
| called.
|
| The recruiter who works directly for the company has said they
| will get back to me soon, but nothing happened yet. As we got
| into closer than two week from the scheduled start date, I asked
| to push the hiring date.
|
| However do I just keep pushing the date until background is done?
|
| I can't see myself quitting current job until the background is
| signed off. Or should I?
|
| Should I just like somehow do two jobs (I don't think I mentally
| can)? Until the background is done?
|
| I've been at my current company for several years, and I can't
| risk having no job (quit, then new job finds something they don't
| like), so what do I do?
|
| I'm fine waiting for months and pushing the date, but will they
| still want me?
| linuxftw wrote:
| > 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.
| bityard wrote:
| 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.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| 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.
| drachun wrote:
| 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.
| knowe wrote:
| I do not have a job at technology corporations yet but i think it
| just takes time to you to learn the work and get set emotional to
| not let things around you dictate how you feel.
| ctvo wrote:
| > Anyone else dealt with this? > Anyone have any type of jobs
| where friction is minimal?
|
| Tactically:
|
| Get better at navigating it. Is there a person hitting a button
| somewhere? Get to know that team well. Make it easy for them to
| approve your requests by being exemplary. Automate the process on
| your end. I've written scripts to fill out forms and open sourced
| them internally at large companies.
|
| Strategically:
|
| Understand why it's so filled with friction at a systemic level.
| Legacy organizational structure? Lack of engineering resources on
| the platform teams? _Try_ to suggest sensible, iterative fixes.
| This only works at some companies, others are so tribal that
| another team approaching them with a low effort / high return
| suggestion is seen as aggression.
|
| It's much more rewarding to attempt to solve these problems and
| be an owner than to go into _ugh whatever_ mode and passively
| take it. It 's also better for your career in the long term.
| _3u10 wrote:
| Yes, bring the hacker ethos to the system. You're not fighting
| code you're fighting the system.
|
| Need that SSL cert? Request it a month before you need it.
|
| Need that column in the table? Request it long before you need
| it. Didn't end up needing it? Sell it to another team, sure it
| might not be named what they want but they can use it today.
| borroka wrote:
| I work for a big US corporation. Every job or project is slow to
| get approved and staffed, and often of little importance. They
| pay me well and as far as I understand, the company does not fire
| people and is unlikely to lay people/departments off without at
| least a few months' notice.
|
| The first 18 months were tough. I came from one of the best tech
| companies in the world, one of those included in the famous
| acronym and starts with A and is based in Seattle, and I got
| quickly frustrated in my new job with the slowness, the
| incompetence, the politics. And people didn't listen to any of my
| ideas, how rude!
|
| They would tell me, "yes, good idea," "of course we'll do it,"
| only to realize that no one thought it was a good idea, if they
| even listened to what I was saying, and no one was working to get
| anything done.
|
| Then I understood the situation and calmed down. This is the way
| things work here, I told myself, and nothing I do is going to
| change anything in such a large company.
|
| Now, some, maybe many among the HN crowd would tell me to move to
| another job, to find a place in which my ideas, assuming they
| make sense, are respected, properly valued, where promotions
| don't happen mysteriously but they reflect the value that the
| individual is bringing and will bring to the organization.
|
| But why?
|
| Why should I give up on a life that allows me to work little,
| take plenty of official and unofficial vacations, explore avenues
| of creativity like writing, painting, and cooking, build up my
| body by working out at the gym and tan properly by laying in the
| sun?
|
| Why would I want to work again for a demanding machine in which I
| am a cog like 95 percent of my stressed, overworked and largely
| unhappy colleagues?
|
| Why would I want to spend the time I can now devote to reading
| fiction in the summer sun, listening to great classical music
| while cooking, preparing instead for interviews that would put me
| in front of people who, at my advanced age, want to find a reason
| not to hire me because I am not as smart as they think, wildly
| overestimating their quality, that they are?
|
| A reasonable question is: well, when this idyllic situation will
| change, because nothing convenient is forever, what are you gonna
| do? I guess, if I need, I will start working "seriously" again.
| But not today, today I am reading a collection of short stories
| written by one of my favorite Japanese authors.
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| Yes. I've dealt with all of it. Don't be emotionally invested in
| your work and enjoy the comp and work life balance.
| mattbaker wrote:
| It sounds like it's pretty early, I'd give it time if you think
| you can hang on.
|
| I do think it's worth recognizing that any big company used to be
| a tiny company, and the road to "big" was probably long and
| complex.
|
| The growth process from small to mid-sized, and mid-sized to
| large, comes with a lot of challenges that you may have never
| witnessed if you've been at smaller places. Some of the high-
| velocity/low-friction approaches to things you might miss (for
| good reason) become a nightmare at scale. Some of that friction
| might actually be healthy.
|
| In that regard it's a lot like jumping into a codebase that's
| been around for many years. If it's your first time some of the
| code is going to look just awful, but you don't know why yet.
|
| - maybe pressures at the time meant that code was the right call
| back then, but it's not now
|
| - maybe that code is the right call and you don't fully
| understand the problem yet because you're brand new
|
| - or maybe the code really is just bad!
|
| Either way, you can't really know until you spend some time with
| it and gain context about the problem domain and the system's
| history.
|
| That said, your perspective as a new hire from a place that moved
| faster is really valuable. I hope you take some notes about these
| experiences and let them collect for a few months as you gain
| more context. A good manager and leadership chain should be
| interested in what you have to say! The more time you spend there
| the more you'll be able to flag the areas that seem the best
| suited for improvement. That kind of stuff can turn into
| promotion-level accomplishments really fast if you have the right
| support.
|
| FWIW I had no patience for big companies early in my career and
| I'm happy I left for smaller ventures, it just wasn't what I was
| looking for whether or not the "friction" was justified. These
| days the pace and process of larger (but not massive) companies
| suits me better, and I can see some sound reasoning behind some
| of the things we do that would look like bureaucracy to someone
| coming from a startup.
|
| Worst case scenario you'll find out the BigCo life just isn't for
| you, at least for now. It's sweet you're getting paid to find out
| :D
| mustardgreen wrote:
| I worked at a BigCo after a bunch of small ones, and got totally
| stressed about the friction as well. Took me a couple years away
| from the experience to realize that slow processes can be a great
| thing in their own right because it gives you a lot of time to
| think about your own interests in and outside of coding.
| porcoda wrote:
| I've faced this at multiple jobs at orgs of different size. My
| solution was to always have more than one thing available to work
| on so when one task bogs down in the mud due to organizational
| processes, I can go work on something else until the blocked task
| makes progress.
|
| If you don't have alternative things to do while things block,
| you might see about getting other things to do. Or, adapt your
| work style to minimize the number of times you run into these
| obstacles. The people I see get most frustrated are those that
| don't adapt to the system and get frustrated when it doesn't work
| the way they want it to. Adapting may be annoying and may break
| some comfortable habits, but in the long run I find it to be the
| route of least angst.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Enjoy the idle time while you have it. It's better to have it
| rather than not.
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