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Ask HN: What did you have to unlearn after leaving a large corp?

• Vandy_Travis 15y ago
  Learning to just do something when it resonates with you. Stop asking permissions, stop asking ahead of time what the outcomes will be. Treating the market as a lab, of sorts, rather than trying to predict results ahead of time.
• pasbesoin 15y ago
  A big corp environment can condition you into being a passive, reactive person. IMHO, this can be one of the hardest things to "unlearn". This might be considered to be akin to the "just a number" paradigm.
  • BadassFractal 15y ago
    Would you elaborate on that point please? Do you mean that a large organization teaches you not to be proactive and wait for instructions to be passed down to you?
    • pasbesoin 15y ago
      For example, you're young and both want to solve problems and make an impression. You've heard and read comments and advice about "initiative". But, it turns our that your own immediate management is heavily invested in the "status quo". A few things may happen: 1) They outright don't understand your initiative, even in the face of the proof of the model you may have up and running. "That can't work." "No one will want it." "Why would you do that?" It can be rather disheartening to invest yourself in such work, only to be criticized for "wasting" your time, resources, etc. You can literally show someone that it works as you describe, with all the affected parties liking it, and still be shot down. More likely, you may have some good ideas for improvements, but not the actual implementations. When you suggest these, you get a similar reaction. 2) They feel threatened by your work. They've cornered their own little domain within the organization, and your improvements threaten that model. If all the reporting becomes electronic, how will the reporting managers justify their headcount, or their own position? Maybe the organization would find value in the transition; however, your interface to the organization is a manager who sees this innovation as a threat. 3) You know of a better tool, but you "can't use it". Your management has decided on [crap product] from [other big co.] and you will use it. You spend 8 hours doing what should take you 4, or less. Your management does not care. (All the more so if they signed off on [$big-budget] for [crap product].) If you are lucky, you may be able to install or develop and use an alternative "unofficially". Management becomes a mockery as the effective people count such "under the radar" workarounds as some of their larger successes. (At least this scenario allows for individual initiative.) 4) You are forced to make decisions that you feel compromise your own ethics. E.g. the compensation system is not tallying credit correctly. You could fix it, but you are told this is "not a priority". You know people are not being compensated correctly -- albeit within rules that are in practice already interpreted loosely and somewhat at management's discretion -- but your management is telling you to ignore this. 5) You see co-workers slacking for hours each day. In brief, "social" results win over actual productive results, in your corner of the organization. Perhaps adding to this, you see other areas of the organization struggling to make up for this deficiency. But the reporting structure keeps your area isolated from these downstream effects. Spend a few years under these conditions, and you can become very cynical. The only real solution is to get out. (Some people successfully climb in the organization; others leave.) But if you start to see the world in these terms, the job hunt itself can become difficult to engage in. I guess a quippy way to sum it up is, "You are what you eat." And that includes your work. From others' experiences, I gather not all Big Co. environments are this way. Often, it seems in good part a matter of which team you are on -- which domain within the larger organization. But, the Dilbert cartoon strip has been successful for a reason.
      • BadassFractal 15y ago
        I can definitely relate to the cynicism, thanks for the extensive response. The speed of progress even within small teams is pitiful. Moving away from ancient tools, especially when they were written by the company itself, is incredibly painful and slow, wasting days of engineering time every months. Reminds me of my company where we spend hundreds of hour maintaining the service's docs as Word docs files checked into a proprietary source control system, instead of relying on a wiki or anything else easily editable on the fly. God forbid someone makes a modification to the document you were editing before you submit, you'll be copying and pasting between the two docs for ever.
• petervandijck 15y ago
  1. Stop asking permission. Permission in BigCo is usually asked in the form of documents that "plan" what you want to do in 3 months. Don't do that. 2. Stop thinking that documents are "progress". Most stuff that is rewarded in BigCo isn't actually progress. Almost all documentation. Most of the stuff you tend to spend your time on.
  • BadassFractal 15y ago
    Good answer, thanks.
• anothertodd 15y ago
  1- Explaining how it can make profit. well making profit is top priority of every company, but at least explaining that a lot is not really feeling good to us tho :) 2- Reporting progress of something you work on. 3- Confidential data. If you're gonna work/found startup, you probably should forget this and be openminded. I saw some who really don't want to talk about (even) brief blurb of idea.