[fiachamp]

The amount of people on HN nowadays that are okay with getting nothing useful done is striking. Startup guy, you don't have to accept being part of a bloated hierarchy that rewards politics more than good decision-making. You could check out at the corpo job and start prototyping your own startup ideas. Or join another early stage startup where your performance matters. I'll be starting one soon - let's keep in touch.

[tharne]

> The amount of people on HN nowadays that are okay with getting nothing useful done is striking.

You're mistaking the role of a mature company. Unlike a startup, in a mature company there are a ton of customers relying on your product and making sure you don't f*k up their business with a mistake or careless change is much more important than building cool new stuff quickly. You don't want your bank "moving fast and breaking things". There are a whole lot of industries where stability and consistency are an order of magnitude more important than fast innovation. This may not be as sexy or fun as rapidly prototyping some MVP, but it's how a lot of important stuff that runs the world works. To this end, a large org may not be everyone's cup of tea.

Yes, there will be some waste and bureaucracy at any large org, but that's not the same as a place full of people "that are okay getting nothing useful done". If anything, it's the established boring companies that are doing something useful (even if that something is not sexy or exciting), while a lot of startups are just burning through someone else's money designing things that no one really wants or needs.

[ryandrake]

Exactly. When you're a $1T+ company, nothing "just takes two weeks" to implement. What if your tiny change has an unforeseen side effect that takes down a critical auth system resulting in a revenue loss of $10M/minute. Are you going to take responsibility? What are you going to write in that postmortem? What if your change infringes on someone's patent or causes some other regulatory compliance related issue and the company gets sued? Your $BIG_COMPANY is not putting this change request through ultra-scrutiny just to frustrate you.

First, the team needing to do the work has about 10X as much work waiting in their queue than they can possibly do given their staffing. So your request either has to be more important than the existing work, you need to get a VP to expedite it, or you need to wait. It's not like there's an engineer just sitting there picking his nose browsing Facebook waiting for work. And even if you just yeet them a patch, they will need to set aside engineering time to review that patch, so back of the queue it goes, too.

Second, that work needs to go through (sometimes multiple) code reviews, have unit and integration tests written, and be able to show those test passing more than once, it needs to get reviewed by legal so it doesn't expose us to legal liability, it needs to get reviewed by security so my 9 year old can't use it to get a root shell, it needs to get reviewed by privacy/data protection so we know it's not leaking some user's personal information, it needs to get a systems review so we know it won't disrupt other critical revenue-generating services. I mean, what are you expecting, just type the code in, run a few tests, any yolo it into production?? No way.

[WastingMyTime89]

> If anything, it's the established boring companies that are doing something useful (even if that something is not sexy or exciting), while a lot of startups are just burning through someone else's money designing things that no one really wants or needs.

To be honest, SME remain the economic backbone of most modern countries and the size of SME still allow them to operate somewhat effectively. Most large companies are either slowly drifting to irrelevance, surviving on a steady diet of acquisitions from teams who could previously achieve things or milking a business line they established when they were smaller and somewhat nibble. Large companies successfully growing by building what you call important stuff without acquiring are the exception.

[washadjeffmad]

Working backwards from your label, what signs leading up to Facebook's recent outages could we have used to evaluate them as being or not being a "mature company"?

I think, perhaps, that being siloed, bureaucratic, large, profitable, and management heavy are not the best or only qualifiers of "maturity".

[bcrosby95]

It's just different priorities.

Startups are busy trying to build a functional house of cards.

Established businesses are trying to keep employees from knocking over that functional house of cards.

[piva00]

> Established businesses are trying to keep employees from knocking over that functional house of cards.

And usually also spend the next 10 years cleaning up the total mess of a house of cards from the startup phase into a more manageable and stable house of cards.

[femiagbabiaka]

if your startup ever makes it to any sort of scale, it will likely have the same problems -- they all do :)

[chris11]

Yeah, I'm at a startup that's rapidly growing, and is adding more process. I don't feel like it's overmanaged, I don't generally need to pull in my manager or skip. But I can imagine giving a similar response, the major difference is that the team I'm on doesn't really have official processes set up.

The main problem is that the team has a lot of work to do. So simple tasks might take awhile if they aren't high priority. If I got significant push back, I'd talk to my manager or skip. Because doing it sooner would mean pushing back other high priority requests.

[toast0]

And when it reaches that stage, the OP can nope out to another up and coming startup. There's no reason someone needs to stay at a company through its whole lifecycle.

[maerF0x0]

and you're lucky if you can actually tell what the real problems are, because mostly I find people are chasing symptoms these days.

[jimjimjim]

exactly this. once you have paying customers you don't want them to grow to hate you and look for an alternative.

So don't break stuff. If you are google or aws then fine do what you want. There will always be another customer along soon.

but YOU are not google or aws.

[mbrodersen]

SpaceX seems to do just fine?

[TigeriusKirk]

Yeah. All the explanations are a waste of words if OP isn't happy with the process. The process isn't going to improve. If it's not to your taste, bail as soon as your deal is complete (might be already).

Personally, I think we all win if the people who want to move fast are in situations where they can move fast.

[62951413]

As much as this sentiment feels natural for an engineer there are a few things to keep in mind:

* you get exposed to a wider range of technology at a startup and can work on different things; that's more fun for you personally especially when you're under 30 yo and still learning the ropes; political indoctrination is mostly non-existent

* many startups at best get acquired; so all your "useful" efforts could end up in /dev/null or be completely replaced after the next VC round

* a minority of startups are doing real tech that's worth tolerating small company inconveniences; for every Imply/Rockset/Starburst there are many more companies building another web app, likely using inferior programming languages

* Big Co compensation and benefits are unbelievable for people coming from startups. Work/life balance cannot be compared too. Unlimited PTO could actually be European-style 4 weeks. I believe there were not so many posh places to work at ten years ago and so it was less realistic to join one.

* there's no question that startups and large corporations require dramatically different mindsets/habits. But you really get paid a lot to tolerate that smaller-than-a-tiny-cog feeling.

[zarkov99]

As someone who just transitioned from a small startup to a much larger organization I feel the pain of the OP, and I hate it, but I get the feeling that this is typical and maybe unavoidable as organizations scale. Is that not your experience? Seems like you either have scale or efficiency.

[throwaway789123]

Totally agree. Would love to hear more about what you're thinking about. Didn't see your contact info listed. How can we keep in touch?

[wanderingmind]

Given that the entire tech industry is built on making money with tools and services that are not useful to the society, it's only fair their employees take the mantra and apply it to their professional sphere of influence.