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Comment by edmcnulty101 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

How many employees is considered mid sized? Like 200?

I have not spent much time thinking about this, but anecdotally:

It's hard to quantify that way, I feel it would depend on how "wide" the structure of the organization is. Perhaps "layers of management" between where the money is actually made and where the decisions are made is a good metric. Two or three, in my experience, have been the best places to work.

Anything more than that and the friction exponentially increases.

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.

I really want to do interesting enjoyable work to be honest.

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.

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.

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.)

> 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.

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.

Interesting. How can one identify what Series a company is? Ask during interview?

Sure you can ask . Another way is lookin for the company through crunchbase , they often show in what series is the company currently.

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.

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.

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.

Totally right.

Do you always put random "#"s in your sentences? Is it a startup thing?

Its a hash tag. Meant to emphasize an abstract concept. A life variable you could say.

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