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Comment by eweise | Hacker News Reader

I'm experiencing large company culture for the first time after being in small startups. What I object to the most, is the competition between engineers created from the goal setting and performance reviews. At startups, I had a domain that I could own. Now, at largco, everyone tries to take over my area in an effort to build their resumes. I used to view fellow engineers as teammates, now I see them as my competition.

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Interesting take.

I believe there is some truth to what you're saying. My experience was slightly different where all the devs were working together, nobody "owned" an entire domain. Mainly because if a dev left, we needed to have someone else on the team capable of picking that up and move forward without everything falling apart because we had a chokepoint on something because one dev held all the keys to it.

But it was the same thing, the sense of everybody working for a common goal, and devs never judging each other. We found ways we complimented each other in order to be more efficient. There were times when you really did feel your worth as a dev and all those sort of romantic ideas of what being a dev was? And there you were, living it every day and being super proud of working shoulder to shoulder with some very talented people who saw you just as talented as they were.

Big Corp? 100% spot on with your observation. Its a fucking shark tank and at times, I felt like I was in a mosh pit. fighting off other devs, over zealous project managers trying to get me to do stuff that would make them look good, directors who constantly cut corners to make themselves look better at the cost of your bonus and promotions. Add in the abnormal turn over and feeling like I never had any stability on any of the teams I was on, I just never felt like I fit in anywhere. It was very high school stuff I didn't want to deal with.

Funny in a startup I value people being pinch hitters. Sure you should have your domain but if there is some exceptional event I want somebody to be able to cover for you or for you to do some job that wasn't even on the roster yesterday.

True. I guess what I mean is that other engineers try to take over the architecture and design. For instance, I had a fellow engineer without even talking with me, create a 2.0 vision doc for part of the system that I had designed and was mainly responsible for. This was clearly an attempt by them, to raise their status and influence.

I feel this pretty hard. You almost have to do your own 2.0 vision doc for things to make sure your name is on it in order to preempt the opportunists and influence pirates, but that can lead to you being seen as "hogging all the good work" and turning into the common adversary.

The key to largeco success is to understand that when you own a certain area, especially if it's an area that will generate opinions or a visibility boost, you will need to manage your full stack, not just the code you write. Code access, PR acceptability requirements, roadmap, triaged backlog, and communication upwards, downwards, and sideways.

If you're not doing that work, either someone else is going to do it or it'll cause issues down the road. Look at it this way: you can either be grateful that so many folks are wanting to help you in your effort and coordinate that effort, or you can stick to the code and complain that someone else is trying to steal your credit.

All of this hinges entirely on your direct manager (and to an extent their manager) being an actually good manager, and not a microcontroller, pass-the-buck-er, or an empty chair.

"All of this hinges entirely on your direct manager (and to an extent their manager) being an actually good manager" I've found this to be a pretty tall ask at most companies. IMO If companies got rid of most of the performance and goal setting, most lower level managers could just convert to project management and teams would be a lot more effective.

It's not a startup vs large company problem but a DNA/company culture thing. I've been at 50 person startups that implemented okrs like Meta or Google.

I feel the same way. There’s a shift that happens at around 80 people where not everyone rows in the same direction. Incentives become different because not everyone “lives and dies” together or by the same metric. By the time you are at bigco status, this is so ingrained that work becomes repeated prisoner’s dilemma trials.

80 seems like a specific number

80-100: my theory is as humans who lived hundreds of thousands of years in small hunter-gathering groups, there is a natural limit to interpersonal relationships we can manage on one-on-one level.

Any levels of social complexities beyond that has to rely on systems/traditions rather than direct interpersonal relationships.

Sounds similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number (in case you hadn't seen it before).

You got into a good large company. In huge old companies (e.g. gov) there's often the opposite problem -- no one wants to take anything. They know that if they do something at least once -- it becomes their problem forever. With some amount of job security fiefdoms of course.

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