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Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

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

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Or meetings, meetings, and... more meetings!

My 2 cents:

As a contractor, charge a lot. They either have budget and want to spend it RIGHT NOW or they don't. The manager engaging you doesn't really care about your daily rate (relatively speaking).

Above comments on automation is spot on. Test suites might be terrible, so the care required to make changes without breaking things is your responsibility, hence the slow pace. What is in your control is the ability to automate your own testing.

Integration with poorly defined APIs is an important skill. You generally won't have another team maintaining and improving a nice API. You will have access to obscure data stores dumped untransformed in the data warehouse from another megacorp's expensive and poorly documented product, possibly with myriad ETL nuances (read: bugs). Learn to work with this and you can extract gold.

If you have a Windows SOE system, embrace Cygwin/similar.

> Learn to work with this and you can extract gold.

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

I have been a contractor/consultant for the last 7 years. What I've seen when you try and go down that "write a test" path is. Oh there's a 2500 line stored procedure with hardcoded network paths for production data in it. Or, this api only runs on the 2nd Tuesday of the Month but only after 8pm when the day of the month is also even. There's so much do-it-live embedded in the legacy systems it takes months to make enough seams to even test things in isolation outside of production. But, if you can get buy-in to make those changes, then exactly what you are talking about helps a ton.

Love being a contractor. I'm currently unemployed but gave multiple years of savings.

It's such a nice feeling to be inbetween contracts and not have to worry about how you're going to pay bills. I feel like I've only just now gotten to that with my business. Congrats and hopefully not unemployed for too long (unless thats what you want!)

The last 6 months I worked at a large for profit education company all I ever worked on or "released" were simple configuration changes. it was a struggle to find things to fill my day with.

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