5 ms·
> Large companies have a tendency to throw up all sorts of impediments to actually getting shit done. early in my career i once worked for a spinoff of a very
by a-dub 5y ago
> Large companies have a tendency to throw up all sorts of impediments to actually getting shit done.
early in my career i once worked for a spinoff of a very large tech company and was involved in a collaboration with the mothership, so to speak.
my boss pulled me aside and explained to me. "here's how this goes. time here does not work like time there does. what happens in one day here takes two weeks there, and if there's anything missing when you ask them for something, that two week timer will reset. so make sure when you communicate with them, you send them absolutely everything they need and then some. then be prepared to wait. for a long, long time. they will either cancel or eventually deliver something. whether the thing they deliver is relevant remains to be seen, but be prepared for it not to be. if this starts sapping your time and energy, bring it back to me."
he was absolutely right.
- retbull 5y agoReading this is making me sick. I am working on leaving my large company for a start up for this exact reason. Something as simple as changing a tag on a server requires submitting a request -> waiting for the reply that they are working on it -> getting someone contacting you 1-3 days later -> Confirming the changes you want -> finding the changes in place the next day -> telling them the ticket is closed.
- notreallyserio 5y agoYou missed some steps between confirming and finding: seeing that it was done wrong, reporting that, wait 1-3 days for a response, repeat at least once.
- retbull 5y ago:(
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- suction 5y agoAbsolutely mirrors my experience when our small company was acquired by a large multinational of French origin. Why is France significant? Because their corporate culture is extremely hierarchical and centralised, similar to how their country is centralised like few others. Used to be we could turn small web apps into production in the course of a week. Nowadays even the most minuscule of features of an existing app will take a year to implement, because "central" will involve several project managers, somewhat related staff, external consultants, etc. etc. into the mix who spend a few months creating power points and excel tapestry under the banner of "change management" before even involving one programmer. Then, when they finally decide that the coders must be involved, stuff gets done quickly and without fuss, and often much less complicated than what was planned for us. Then they spend another few days sending each other congratulatory emails about how successful the project ended, apparently ignorant to the fact that they managed to spend a year on a feature that could have been implemented and tested in a week if they hadn't been involved.
- engineeringwoke 5y agoSounds like successful bureaucracy to me. At some point, change is difficult for a large organism. It became large by doing what it is doing and doing that well. The reality is that change is oftentimes destructive; what is so much clearly "better" to you is not clearly better to the organism. Slowing things down, getting many people to consider the new, is all purposeful and quite useful in reality.
- suction 5y agoAre you French?
- toqy 5y agoI’ve been trying to get adequate access to Veeva Quality Docs API in their sandbox environment from some team at my job for two months, incrementally getting more permissions every couple weeks. My point of contact in that team is out all of December. This is so I can build a POC of a feature that they can evaluate to tell me if they’ll give me prod access. No documentation or ui mock-ups will suffice for them to determine that. It must be a functional prototype. I’ve got two hours of working time overlap with their time zone. Ultimately I expect it to take 6 months and be told no.