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Comment by lunias | Hacker News Reader

Remember when you used to ask your Mom / Dad, "Why?" and they'd respond with, "Because I said so." It's like that, but subtly more infuriating because it's never a single identifiable person saying "no" that could be spoken to, understood, and reasoned with. The answer that you'll get at a big company is, "because that's the way it is".

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Having worked at Big Co and then on my own company for years, this is exactly what I was thinking.

You'll lose professional autonomy in exchange for a good salary, job security, and resume bling. And you probably won't have to work as hard or as often (again, probably).

Depends on where you go. I work at a BigCo and IMO if you see a "because that's the way it is" and you don't like it, you can change it if you can justify the change.

Everything has tradeoffs and sometimes the cost to change something is higher than the benefits gained, but the people I work with are always willing to listen.

Yeah, same experience. You can't change all of the things but you can change like 1 thing at a time that's really peeving you off, iff you have a good reason & can make a good argument & it's worth your time & effort.

Change at startups means convincing 0-1 people. Change at a BigCo means convincing 5-10 people.

Those require very different tactics and skillsets.

"you probably won't have to work as hard"

For me, it was a question of: do I put in 40% to get 90% completed, or do I put in 150% to get 99% completed?

I'd like to echo this, along with the "relax" sentiment from other comments.

I worked incredibly hard to open source a project at a faang. I was even given a customer obsession award for it. No promo.. and no promo level projects for the next year or so... and now this open source project is "too old" for promo consideration.

I've learned to relax and give just enough to not be marked LE. I now have a lot of time to dedicate to other pursuits.

LE?

Low Energy I think.

How was business impact measured when deciding to open source the project?

Probably too late to respond, but just in case.

We were measuring the number of similar support requests that came to the team. Our library would allow customers to resolve these problems on their own. We had a good estimate of reduced requests, but not a good estimate increased time to maintain the open source library.

That is so accurate and succinct.

I'd say 40% for 80-85% from my experience.

Yeah, I think that's accurate and reflects the low level of polish in many newer Google products

In my career, I've had almost the opposite experience.

At $bigco, it was possible to beg/borrow for 100k to solve some problem, or hack together some tooling to solve a problem the team was running into. Need some servers and licenses, and it's near year end, partner with a program manager who hasn't used all his budget, help solve their problems, and get things done. I ended up spending something like $250k before the VP was even aware of the side project, and when it got to the VP level, it was how do we spend more to fix the gaps and have proper resources so it's not some toy side project. It was that way anyways, up until $bigco decided to emulate the way it thought the FAANG companies worked, and the management their started trying to micro-manage everyone in a large culture shift.

At mid-size growth company, getting things done was still available, but you sort of had to tiptoe around decisions or solutions Co-Founder/CTO or employee number 10 had a personal interest in or battle it out on particularly poor tech decisions. Most progress was made in areas that the team didn't have an interest or expertise in (IE security), but it was ultimately possible to make progress.

And in startup life, probably the least autonomy of all. The engineering manual literally says you only should work on what you've been assigned, as doing anything else creates chaos. Implying, you don't want to be a chaos maker in the eyes of your employer do you? So it's more difficult than anywhere else I've worked to tiptoe around these emotional investments, have any level of autonomy, and move the product forward.

Anyways, I think my overall message is, companies are far too varied to have any idea on what to expect from moving from startup to $bigco. There might be some general trends, but the environment varies so much, you're not guaranteed to see any general trends when making the switch. All that can really be said, is it will be different, and you may have to jump a few times to really see any of the generalizations apply to you.

Note: Using throwaway account to avoid any blowback.

> up until $bigco decided to emulate the way it thought the FAANG companies worked

thought being the keyword here, As somebody who works for FAANG, we are allowed a lot of leeway to do what we think we need for the goal set.

I agree with your overall message 100%. Big companies are like cities. There are "good" and "bad" areas and different people may draw that distinction differently. If you have mobility within the company it's not too difficult to move into what you consider a good area over time. As a consultant / contractor I didn't have that luxury and often got saddled with the teams that needed to change the most, but resisted every opportunity to do so. Had I been a full-time employee and participated in some politics I think I could have greatly improved my autonomy and satisfaction.

Tip top real estate on the Dead Sea. ;)

http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

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

I don't think he was saying that the people are homogenous, but he was saying that you often get put in a position where somebody way over your head makes a decision that affects your work, and by the time it reaches you, that decision is non-negotiable and unexplained.

I spent 17 years at another tech megacorp and spent the bulk of my time there as an intrapreneur. For me, it was a series of "anointed" roles where I was dependent on (and tied to) a particular sponsor. The sponsor operated on different levels of transparency with their leaders. While I liked the idea of being a "cowboy," it ended up being a serious detriment to my career at that company. The work I did was mostly director and above level, but the recognition/salary was far less. My last sponsor made enough enemies in the "establishment" that he got RIFfed and I got hung out to dry and was RIFfed on the next round.

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

Still sounds better than being a feature factory for someone else's vision.

I think you may have read the first word in my comment as “entrepreneurship”; or do I misunderstand what you mean?

“…and give you money”

You can always quit and bootstrap it yourself to capture all the upside. Just beware selling a software engineer salary’s worth of anything is fairly challenging.

You are correct. Companies of a certain size are most always extremely heterogenous. There are good and bad places to be in a company and everyone has a different opinion on where those places are.

It also seems that you have experience working at big tech companies. It's not always so diverse and you can't always operate as autonomously as a team at a big company that just needs technology to operate, but doesn't claim to be in the business of producing it.

That's well put.

I did some contracting work for a very large organization last year. It was my first experience trying to navigate the rules inside such a large organization. The interaction that I found most amusing is that I would ask for something that would require crossing an organization boundary and the immediate response would be, "No.", followed shortly by, "Wait, why do you need that?" This happened several times and was just part of the dance required to find the right person to sign off on my plan.

That's a constant.

As an external consultant, do remember you have the power to play the expert.

"Well that's how other Top50 companies I've worked with have done it" isn't the worst card to play.

Usually though, it requires hitching your wagon to whatever VP brought you in, and trying not to burn them with blowback.

Although honestly, most of the time I think it was "No" on the basis of inertia / resistance to change, more than actual disagreement. So technical arguments can win the day there (with other engineers).

There will be plenty of this, and occasionally sub in "that's unprofessional". Requesting to work from home will be unprofessional. Taking PTO will be unprofessional. Coming in at 9:02am will be unprofessional. Requesting the 1-year raise that's in your signed employment agreement will be unprofessional.

I've had this exact argument:

Me: "I'm going to be working from home tomorrow."

Them: "What? First I'm hearing of this. We need everyone here tomorrow."

Me: "I'm confident that I can do the work from home. I have an obligation that I can't go back on. It's been on my calendar as well."

Them: "Not acceptable."

Me: "Alright. I'm taking PTO tomorrow."

Them: very mad "Fine. Work from home if you can."

Ended up winning this one pretty easily considering there were no expectations / limits set on work from home. The just enforced no-work-from-home against people ad hoc.

Also like working with your parents, it is always better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.

Getting permission/authorization for anything is often a bureacratic nightmare with people who neither care enough to help you, nor wanting to authorize something that might get them in trouble, nor even knowing who's the right person to get authorization from.

As long as you're not breaking important, just do it.

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