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Yes. It even happens at medium sized companies. One answer is to accept the way things are at BigCo and to just coast along in your role, which is not necessa

Yes. It even happens at medium sized companies. One answer is to accept the way things are at BigCo and to just coast along in your role, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Another answer is to work at an early-stage startup or a small non-tech company where you can move fast. The tradeoff there is lack of job security and lesser pay. Don't ever expect to move fast at BigCo. It's a BigCo for a reason. By moving fast, you could upset the cash cow, hence the friction placed in front of you. But this can work in your favor. Excellence will not be expected of you at BigCo, and if anyone complains about why nothing is getting done, you just repeat exactly why. As long as the company is making money and you haven't made any enemies, the chances of you getting fired are slim to none. IMO, you have to look at the big picture. If you ignore the friction factor, is life at BigCo so bad? Are your hours reasonable? Do you like your coworkers? Good pay? Learning to let go your frustration with how you think the company should be run may be the most favorable choice. Remember, all jobs suck, more or less. A year after you change companies, you will find things to hate about that one as well.

sillysaurusx 4y ago
OP, there's a lot of wisdom in this comment. I suspect you might be 20-something instead of 30-something, and in hindsight I wish I'd relaxed more. And I especially wish I'd learned to play the politics game, or at least pay attention to it. Your alliances will make or break your career at BigCo. You should make sure that your manager feels like you're directly advancing their career, not just yours. I suggest channeling your ambition into your own projects, hobbies, and interests. If I'd spent more time making my own game engine rather than working on theirs, I'd still have it today.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ghaff 4y ago
  Early in my career, I wasted way too much energy and emotion getting upset about things that I probably couldn't change and just didn't matter. I'm not talking about just going with the flow on everything! But I did get unnecessarily upset and angry at people way more often than I should have.
- snakey 4y ago
  OP, I’m also a twenty something that moved from a fast paced start-up to a Behemoth. It’s been 7 months so far and throughout the first 6 months, I have fought and resisted how BigCo operates—it left me tired and even more miserable. Within the last month however, I have stumbled across the same advice as has been given by the wise members above. This advice is invaluable, accept that within these organisations a lot is outside of your control. Rather, focus on projects, learning and hobbies outside of your work that bring you joy. If your feelings remain unchanged within a couple of months to a year then consider making a change to another Co. Good or bad, these experiences are invaluable in helping us to decide on how we wish to pursue our careers.
- shpx 4y ago
  Do you guys ever think there's more to life than being really really really ridiculously well compensated?
  - dijonman2 4y ago
    When you have a wife and kids the pressure is on earning. It’s fucking expensive to have a family.
    - klipt 4y ago
      But do both you and your wife have to be at BigCo? Maybe you could take a more flexible, fulfilling job that lets you have more time with the kids while she focuses on money. Break those gender stereotypes?
    - nisegami 4y ago
      I will simply not do that
    - winrid 4y ago
      It's expensive to live in the bay area and try to do everything well. Nobody in my family ever made more than $10/hr growing up. I turned out okay. I think. :)
  - snapplebobapple 4y ago
    There is. That's what the ridiculous compensation is funding.
roflyear 4y ago
I've worked at a few startups that have this problem too. Mostly because tech leadership came from a bank. I would never hire someone again if they have worked at a bank for more than a couple of years.
- mk89 4y ago
  That's a huge bias to bring in an interview. Sometimes you work on some cool project for a while, then it becomes boring, etc. Or sometimes you're stuck with that job because of lack of other local opportunities. Or whatever other reason.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    I agree, big bias. I'm not totally being serious. But I have had really bad experiences with people working at banks.
- mirntyfirty 4y ago
  I think that working at a bank is fantastic so long as a person can internalize the good parts. The bank I was at had the best data practices of any company I’ve worked at by a mile. They wouldn’t hesitate to write huge checks to make sure that the hardware systems and teams supporting those systems were perfect. Software management was a bit procedural but the results were consistent and high quality.
- mring33621 4y ago
  I have worked at 2 really big banks and they have many very talented, well-rounded people. The friction is there to protect the firm. It's true, though, that upper leadership tends to be incompetent. Don't hire them. But finance tech VPs and ExecDirs are often highly skilled, smart people.
  - xchaotic 4y ago
    A lot of the friction in the banks is for legal reasons - they HAVE to abide by certain protocols. If you treat that as an extra challenge rather than a hindrance it will be more rewarding.
jimnotgym 4y ago
This is a great comment. I urge OP to take this on board Look at the lifers at BigCo, and how they roll with it. They choose their battles carefully, they don't fight the system. They are good colleagues, and they are paid well for their long service. They also go home on time!
nonfamous 4y ago
It took me a long time to figure this out, but the BigCo friction does come with benefits. Particularly benefits of scale and risk reduction. Need your app localized? Surprise, that happens automatically with BigCo processes. Didn’t think about GDPR compliance? Surprise, part of the delay you’re experiencing is that review. Need an awareness campaign? There’s a whole marketing team to help you with that. Thing big and slow, and you’ll work it all out.
- toss1 4y ago
  Yup, exactly. The complexities of both running a large operation and operating globally are vastly greater than a small operation. Simply the number of nodes that must communicate has a combinatorial explosion. So, there needs to be a standard way of dealing with that, or entropy also explodes. So, bureaucracy happens, with processes that sorta fit everyone but rarely exactly fit, so friction increases. A saying I heard from Africa: "If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together". GP is going far and together, and yes the other people will necessarily slow you down vs going alone. The decision is whether one really wants this journey, in which case, learn how to work within the large org, or actually wants the faster but less secure career.
  - bavell 4y ago
    > A saying I heard from Africa: "If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together". Love this! Definitely gonna use this sometime.
    - toss1 4y ago
      Indeed - it was very memorable for me too the first time I heard it !
mring33621 4y ago
I have worked at several big companies, including BigFatHugeBank and heartily agree with the above comment.
mbesto 4y ago
> One answer is to accept the way things are at BigCo and to just coast along in your role, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Sound advice. The HN community (rightly) skews towards entrepreneur hackers who have a general distain for BigCo employment. I love this quote from Prof G on joining BigCo: https://youtu.be/ffDVe-NgFt4?t=662 https://youtu.be/ffDVe-NgFt4?t=662 You're going to have access to what is the greatest wealth generator in history and its called the US Corporation. On a risk adjusted basis, you're better off working at a Big Corporation
- taurath 4y ago
  > The HN community (rightly) skews towards entrepreneur hackers who have a general distain for BigCo employment. On the contrary, I find that most work at bigco or smaller companies and come to HN to play out their dreams of what it would be like to take the risks that people with lots of wealth can make freely
  - mbesto 4y ago
    Also probably true.
  - meken 4y ago
    Seems like the more wealth you have the harder it is to make risks…
bdcravens 4y ago
> Another answer is to work at an early-stage startup or a small non-tech company where you can move fast. The tradeoff there is lack of job security and lesser pay. I work for a very small "non-tech" company, have been here 12 years, and have a great income. The tradeoff I had to make was a much higher level of responsibility. (I'm at the very top of the tech stack - if something isn't working, there's no one for me to blame, aside from a vendor like AWS)
- jerDev 4y ago
  Lesser pay is not always true.
closeparen 4y ago
From MediumCo I will say: there is a lot of friction, quite intentionally, when you go off the rails. As a backend engineer, messing with things like VMs and SSL certificates yourself is definitely way off the rails. We want that to be hard. You are supposed to be creating and iterating on services using the standard application frameworks, deployed to the standard shared clusters, communicating through the standard service mesh, etc. where all of that is handled automatically. Make sure there's not a golden path that you're missing? Or that your reasons for departing from it are really insurmountable?
- PaywallBuster 4y ago
  work at managed service provider everything is a ticket ssl is expiring, - make a ticket for the customer, - request a quotation, - wait for approval, - finally issue the cert manually, - finally deploy it (manually, using some tool of course)
  - ramphastidae 4y ago
    Seems totally reasonable to me.
    - closeparen 4y ago
      If you can have such a structured, rote process then why isn't it just automated/self-serve? That is one thing I like about my medium-sized (public) company, you can't necessarily touch things yourself but you only wait in line for human attention if your request is somewhat unusual or actually calls for discretion and creativity.
      - PaywallBuster 4y ago
        "let's encrypt is not good enough, our customers are "enterprise", bla bla"
      - Swannie 4y ago
        "Because our users are irresponsible, and will order 1000's of dollars of externally signed certificates..." shock horror maybe they might actually ... get more done and therefore need more stuff :D
8ytecoder 4y ago
Not disagreeing but you can't just give up and coast along either. Don't get me wrong, I've been doing it for a couple of years and getting ready to quit my job because of it. It gets frustrating and a tool that's not used frequently loses its edge. I'd say do a couple of things - a) Provide constructive recommendations on the specific friction points. Sometimes, especially coming from a small company background, you fail to realize the need for a process or review. It doesn't mean it can't be improved but resist the immediate urge to hate it. b) Plan ahead. Once you get familiar with how the processes work, set aside time to raise request before you actually need the resource. I was terrible at this and it came to bite me many times. Anticipate and plan ahead.
barnabee 4y ago
I found that the more I delivered and the happier I made senior people, the more I could ignore the rules and process and friction and get stuff done. Probably a year or so in I barely paid any notice to most of it. I had a huge amount of freedom, really. But after a bit over a decade I finally moved to the world of startups. I’d never go back. So while you can definitely work on removing your own personal frictions, and it’s absolutely worth selectively breaking the rules, I’m not sure you’ll ever be as happy as you could be in a different environment if that’s how you feel now.
- mymllnthaccount 4y ago
  >I found that the more I delivered and the happier I made senior people, the more I could ignore the rules and process and friction and get stuff done. Yeah, I agree with this. My strategy has been to figure out what my boss wants to do, figure out what I want to do, and figure out what my job duties actually are. Then focus on the intersection of the first two and doing the minimal work necessary for the third. This means trying to get around process for your boss's pet project or to work on what you want while making your internal customers go through as many hoops as your organizational structure allows when they want you to do your job duties. This probably comes off a bit cynical and I do have some pride in doing a good job, but this is kind of my basic corporate strategy.
  - barnabee 4y ago
    The important thing is that job duties often don’t have to stay static. Especially if you are already doing a good job at what you want to be doing and keeping someone senior happy, it’s often possible and sometimes even surprisingly easy to evolve your official/main duties in that direction too.
sklargh 4y ago
This is corect analysis. BigCo comes with pros and cons, but the pros are typically job security* and a life outside of work. My son was born three months before my father died and wow did that rapidly change my perspective on the relative value of an agile but single threaded rocketship vs. a megalith taking a a six year ootm call option on a few months of brilliant work. Relatedly, best advice I received was that the grass is green and brown on both sides. *standard disclaimers about at-will employment

sillysaurusx 4y ago

OP, there's a lot of wisdom in this comment. I suspect you might be 20-something instead of 30-something, and in hindsight I wish I'd relaxed more. And I especially wish I'd learned to play the politics game, or at least pay attention to it. Your alliances will make or break your career at BigCo. You should make sure that your manager feels like you're directly advancing their career, not just yours. I suggest channeling your ambition into your own projects, hobbies, and interests. If I'd spent more time making my own game engine rather than working on theirs, I'd still have it today.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ghaff 4y ago
Early in my career, I wasted way too much energy and emotion getting upset about things that I probably couldn't change and just didn't matter. I'm not talking about just going with the flow on everything! But I did get unnecessarily upset and angry at people way more often than I should have.
snakey 4y ago
OP, I’m also a twenty something that moved from a fast paced start-up to a Behemoth. It’s been 7 months so far and throughout the first 6 months, I have fought and resisted how BigCo operates—it left me tired and even more miserable. Within the last month however, I have stumbled across the same advice as has been given by the wise members above. This advice is invaluable, accept that within these organisations a lot is outside of your control. Rather, focus on projects, learning and hobbies outside of your work that bring you joy. If your feelings remain unchanged within a couple of months to a year then consider making a change to another Co. Good or bad, these experiences are invaluable in helping us to decide on how we wish to pursue our careers.
shpx 4y ago
Do you guys ever think there's more to life than being really really really ridiculously well compensated?
- dijonman2 4y ago
  When you have a wife and kids the pressure is on earning. It’s fucking expensive to have a family.
  - klipt 4y ago
    But do both you and your wife have to be at BigCo? Maybe you could take a more flexible, fulfilling job that lets you have more time with the kids while she focuses on money. Break those gender stereotypes?
  - nisegami 4y ago
    I will simply not do that
  - winrid 4y ago
    It's expensive to live in the bay area and try to do everything well. Nobody in my family ever made more than $10/hr growing up. I turned out okay. I think. :)
- snapplebobapple 4y ago
  There is. That's what the ridiculous compensation is funding.

roflyear 4y ago

I've worked at a few startups that have this problem too. Mostly because tech leadership came from a bank. I would never hire someone again if they have worked at a bank for more than a couple of years.

mk89 4y ago
That's a huge bias to bring in an interview. Sometimes you work on some cool project for a while, then it becomes boring, etc. Or sometimes you're stuck with that job because of lack of other local opportunities. Or whatever other reason.
- roflyear 4y ago
  I agree, big bias. I'm not totally being serious. But I have had really bad experiences with people working at banks.
mirntyfirty 4y ago
I think that working at a bank is fantastic so long as a person can internalize the good parts. The bank I was at had the best data practices of any company I’ve worked at by a mile. They wouldn’t hesitate to write huge checks to make sure that the hardware systems and teams supporting those systems were perfect. Software management was a bit procedural but the results were consistent and high quality.
mring33621 4y ago
I have worked at 2 really big banks and they have many very talented, well-rounded people. The friction is there to protect the firm. It's true, though, that upper leadership tends to be incompetent. Don't hire them. But finance tech VPs and ExecDirs are often highly skilled, smart people.
- xchaotic 4y ago
  A lot of the friction in the banks is for legal reasons - they HAVE to abide by certain protocols. If you treat that as an extra challenge rather than a hindrance it will be more rewarding.

jimnotgym 4y ago

This is a great comment. I urge OP to take this on board Look at the lifers at BigCo, and how they roll with it. They choose their battles carefully, they don't fight the system. They are good colleagues, and they are paid well for their long service. They also go home on time!

nonfamous 4y ago

It took me a long time to figure this out, but the BigCo friction does come with benefits. Particularly benefits of scale and risk reduction. Need your app localized? Surprise, that happens automatically with BigCo processes. Didn’t think about GDPR compliance? Surprise, part of the delay you’re experiencing is that review. Need an awareness campaign? There’s a whole marketing team to help you with that. Thing big and slow, and you’ll work it all out.

toss1 4y ago
Yup, exactly. The complexities of both running a large operation and operating globally are vastly greater than a small operation. Simply the number of nodes that must communicate has a combinatorial explosion. So, there needs to be a standard way of dealing with that, or entropy also explodes. So, bureaucracy happens, with processes that sorta fit everyone but rarely exactly fit, so friction increases. A saying I heard from Africa: "If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together". GP is going far and together, and yes the other people will necessarily slow you down vs going alone. The decision is whether one really wants this journey, in which case, learn how to work within the large org, or actually wants the faster but less secure career.
- bavell 4y ago
  > A saying I heard from Africa: "If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together". Love this! Definitely gonna use this sometime.
  - toss1 4y ago
    Indeed - it was very memorable for me too the first time I heard it !

mring33621 4y ago

I have worked at several big companies, including BigFatHugeBank and heartily agree with the above comment.

mbesto 4y ago

> One answer is to accept the way things are at BigCo and to just coast along in your role, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Sound advice. The HN community (rightly) skews towards entrepreneur hackers who have a general distain for BigCo employment. I love this quote from Prof G on joining BigCo: https://youtu.be/ffDVe-NgFt4?t=662 https://youtu.be/ffDVe-NgFt4?t=662 You're going to have access to what is the greatest wealth generator in history and its called the US Corporation. On a risk adjusted basis, you're better off working at a Big Corporation

taurath 4y ago
> The HN community (rightly) skews towards entrepreneur hackers who have a general distain for BigCo employment. On the contrary, I find that most work at bigco or smaller companies and come to HN to play out their dreams of what it would be like to take the risks that people with lots of wealth can make freely
- mbesto 4y ago
  Also probably true.
- meken 4y ago
  Seems like the more wealth you have the harder it is to make risks…

bdcravens 4y ago

> Another answer is to work at an early-stage startup or a small non-tech company where you can move fast. The tradeoff there is lack of job security and lesser pay. I work for a very small "non-tech" company, have been here 12 years, and have a great income. The tradeoff I had to make was a much higher level of responsibility. (I'm at the very top of the tech stack - if something isn't working, there's no one for me to blame, aside from a vendor like AWS)

jerDev 4y ago
Lesser pay is not always true.

closeparen 4y ago

From MediumCo I will say: there is a lot of friction, quite intentionally, when you go off the rails. As a backend engineer, messing with things like VMs and SSL certificates yourself is definitely way off the rails. We want that to be hard. You are supposed to be creating and iterating on services using the standard application frameworks, deployed to the standard shared clusters, communicating through the standard service mesh, etc. where all of that is handled automatically. Make sure there's not a golden path that you're missing? Or that your reasons for departing from it are really insurmountable?

PaywallBuster 4y ago
work at managed service provider everything is a ticket ssl is expiring, - make a ticket for the customer, - request a quotation, - wait for approval, - finally issue the cert manually, - finally deploy it (manually, using some tool of course)
- ramphastidae 4y ago
  Seems totally reasonable to me.
  - closeparen 4y ago
    If you can have such a structured, rote process then why isn't it just automated/self-serve? That is one thing I like about my medium-sized (public) company, you can't necessarily touch things yourself but you only wait in line for human attention if your request is somewhat unusual or actually calls for discretion and creativity.
    - PaywallBuster 4y ago
      "let's encrypt is not good enough, our customers are "enterprise", bla bla"
    - Swannie 4y ago
      "Because our users are irresponsible, and will order 1000's of dollars of externally signed certificates..." shock horror maybe they might actually ... get more done and therefore need more stuff :D

8ytecoder 4y ago

Not disagreeing but you can't just give up and coast along either. Don't get me wrong, I've been doing it for a couple of years and getting ready to quit my job because of it. It gets frustrating and a tool that's not used frequently loses its edge. I'd say do a couple of things - a) Provide constructive recommendations on the specific friction points. Sometimes, especially coming from a small company background, you fail to realize the need for a process or review. It doesn't mean it can't be improved but resist the immediate urge to hate it. b) Plan ahead. Once you get familiar with how the processes work, set aside time to raise request before you actually need the resource. I was terrible at this and it came to bite me many times. Anticipate and plan ahead.

barnabee 4y ago

I found that the more I delivered and the happier I made senior people, the more I could ignore the rules and process and friction and get stuff done. Probably a year or so in I barely paid any notice to most of it. I had a huge amount of freedom, really. But after a bit over a decade I finally moved to the world of startups. I’d never go back. So while you can definitely work on removing your own personal frictions, and it’s absolutely worth selectively breaking the rules, I’m not sure you’ll ever be as happy as you could be in a different environment if that’s how you feel now.

mymllnthaccount 4y ago
>I found that the more I delivered and the happier I made senior people, the more I could ignore the rules and process and friction and get stuff done. Yeah, I agree with this. My strategy has been to figure out what my boss wants to do, figure out what I want to do, and figure out what my job duties actually are. Then focus on the intersection of the first two and doing the minimal work necessary for the third. This means trying to get around process for your boss's pet project or to work on what you want while making your internal customers go through as many hoops as your organizational structure allows when they want you to do your job duties. This probably comes off a bit cynical and I do have some pride in doing a good job, but this is kind of my basic corporate strategy.
- barnabee 4y ago
  The important thing is that job duties often don’t have to stay static. Especially if you are already doing a good job at what you want to be doing and keeping someone senior happy, it’s often possible and sometimes even surprisingly easy to evolve your official/main duties in that direction too.

sklargh 4y ago

This is corect analysis. BigCo comes with pros and cons, but the pros are typically job security* and a life outside of work. My son was born three months before my father died and wow did that rapidly change my perspective on the relative value of an agile but single threaded rocketship vs. a megalith taking a a six year ootm call option on a few months of brilliant work. Relatedly, best advice I received was that the grass is green and brown on both sides. *standard disclaimers about at-will employment