
Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of? - 1729
To add more context to my question, I’m currently in a product leadership position at a ~300 person SaaS company and I found my way here by way of a semi-decent exit as part of a startup’s founding team. However, I have been considering a switch to a much bigger company (Microsoft, Google, AWS) of late. All I’ve ever learnt over the last decade has been by operating in a capital constrained environment. Moreover, I don’t have a lot of reserve energy in the tank to direct it at another startup after 10 years of blood, sweat and toil.<p>I often find myself thinking of and seeking out experiences from my peers at these behemoths on how decisions are made and products get built there. On one hand, I’m scared of slowly going further away from all my learnings as an entrepreneur (a lot of which haven’t come easy!!!) but on the other I feel like not having had relevant experience in the right BU&#x2F;product within a big co is limiting my field of vision. What are some things I should consider before switching?
======
austincheney
Here is what it means to work at a big company:

* Things work slowly, so relax. There are many people that have a hand in every aspect of a product decision.

* At a startup you are actively changing the world. That’s done now. Put that completely out of your head. You are cog in a machine. Instead focus on your assigned product, help your teammates, and just learn to relax.

* You, the individual, are not important. The product is important, the department that delivers the product is less important, the teams that comprise the department are less important than that, and so on. Again, accept the reality and just relax.

* Do your best. Unlike at a startup, generally you will have time to get things correct. This is the difference between competence and others who struggle to get things right and always appear to be in a hurry. There is no reason to be in a hurry.

* Expect insufficient test automation, lots of regression, and plenty of repetition. Also expect everybody to be an expert that is in a hurry and things in a unique way. Just be patient, politely nod, and just relax.

* If you are good at systems automation then learn to automate away as much of your job as you can. Use the now increased free time to contribute to documentation and internal knowledge repositories. You will find that a lot of the documentation can be automated as well.

* My employer has something like 270,000 employees so it’s forgiven if you have no idea what all of those people in your cubicle farm do. You need to actively spend at least 2 days a month answering those questions.

* Just because you are at a big company does not mean you are safe. I have been in a large established super well known .com that failed. People get laid off even when big companies are healthy.

* If you don’t like being bored and are highly risk adverse you might find the big company life highly depressing. A lot of my advice here is to just relax, but I hate relaxing.

~~~
KKKKkkkk1
> _At a startup you are actively changing the world._

That sounds very exciting. Can you point to one startup that's changing the
world?

~~~
fangorn
SpaceX?

~~~
sheepybloke
Are they though? They're almost 18 years old at this point, so I feel like
they don't really count as a startup.

~~~
manquer
How old and how large has really nothing to do with being a startup or not .
It just means a fledgling business whose revenues are expected to change
rapidly and is developing a product/ business .

This is in contrast to stable or blue chip like companies who have stable
revenues and their product lines are very well established.

The distinction is important for two groups of people .

a) investors - Risks and rewards are fundamentally different , therefore
valuation methods are also different t you would use something like a
Discounted Cash flow for stable corp you might look at IP, ARR , DAU or any
number of other metrics for a startup whose revenues are not stable enough to
use DCF etc

b) employees - change or innovation is far more deeply grained culture in
startups , What worked yesterday may not work today, that requires different
mindset to be successful at

Amazon , Uber are still startups despite what you think about their sizes ,
ages and current revenues . Building a AWS is only possible if you can
completely rethink what is that you sell .

------
lunias
Remember when you used to ask your Mom / Dad, "Why?" and they'd respond with,
"Because I said so." It's like that, but subtly more infuriating because it's
never a single identifiable person saying "no" that could be spoken to,
understood, and reasoned with. The answer that you'll get at a big company is,
"because that's the way it is".

~~~
katzgrau
Having worked at Big Co and then on my own company for years, this is exactly
what I was thinking.

You'll lose professional autonomy in exchange for a good salary, job security,
and resume bling. And you probably won't have to work as hard or as often
(again, probably).

~~~
bobbytherobot
"you probably won't have to work as hard"

For me, it was a question of: do I put in 40% to get 90% completed, or do I
put in 150% to get 99% completed?

~~~
throwaway9191a
I'd like to echo this, along with the "relax" sentiment from other comments.

I worked _incredibly_ hard to open source a project at a faang. I was even
given a customer obsession award for it. No promo.. and no promo level
projects for the next year or so... and now this open source project is "too
old" for promo consideration.

I've learned to relax and give just enough to not be marked LE. I now have a
lot of time to dedicate to other pursuits.

~~~
nnoitra
LE?

~~~
0xEFF
Low Energy I think.

------
danck
Once when I was frustrated with my current Job at a large corporation, an
experienced friend told me the secret.

He said, they'd value "predictability over excellence".

Meaning, talk about your goals, give an estimation and arrive exactly on
point. It doesn't matter if it's your personal project or projects/processes
where you take the lead.

Being faster than estimated, or finding a better way and switching while your
doing it will not be appreciated.

This really unlocked a lot of success and explained many glass walls i've been
running into before.

~~~
caleb-allen
I joined a large company about 9 months ago, coming from startups, and while I
knew things would be slower, your quote seems to make explicit something that
I've observed in my time here.

I think I had the mentality of "putting out fires" that is always the case in
startups, and so for a few months I was stressed that I wasn't doing enough,
since my workload was lower than I'd experienced at startups.

But I've learned that the work that is value most is the work that helps
others, and what helps others seems to be anything that is highly predictable.
So, "showing up" and consistently being responsive and available during work
hours. But also writing automations which are visible, reliable, and have a
material impact on a team (or many teams).

Thanks for your insight, I think I'll keep that more front of mind in the
coming weeks

------
systematical
Well my journey was a bit different than yours. I was Lead Dev at a small
startup (<10 people) and went to a non-FAANG Fortune 500 and assumed a Sr role
on a team. Things I didn't think would bother were a dress code. It does, it
does bother me. Especially in the Summer. I was surprised on my first day that
I didn't get to choose my own O.S. I really miss Linux, it really effects my
productivity being in Mac. I thought projects Jira tasks would be better
planned, they are not, they barely have any information in them. Documentation
is a joke somehow. Onboarding was a joke. They just kinda stuck me in there. I
couldn't believe I had better processes in place at the startup. Things move
slow. Some days I barely have any work, its not much fun. There are things
that can't be beat though. Chance to move around. Better benefits. With that
said, I'll be looking for a smaller company after I've reached my year mark
(they have me in relocation expense cuffs).

I hope your experience is better. If you're going to a FAANG I imagine it will
be. This place is much more buttoned up.

~~~
bengale
This rings a bell for me. Before I started at a big firm I assumed they'd be
super optimised to get people going fast, as its a common occurrence for them.
What I didn't realise was that you sitting waiting for equipment and logins
for 2 weeks doesn't show up on anyones spreadsheet so its not a real loss as
far as they're concerned.

Plenty of time for self improvement though if you're just using it as a
stepping stone.

~~~
systematical
Again I've never had less motivation at a job in my life. And yeah, no
computer and no licenses waiting for me.

------
pembrook
> _I find myself seeking out experiences from peers at these behemoths on how
> decisions are made and products get built there._

I think you will be mostly astounded at the _lack_ of things you can learn
from the way decisions are made inside big companies. Which is to say, they
aren’t super rational organizations.

As a multiple FAANG alumni, I can tell you that decisions made are often
strongly influenced by politics, individual executive “hunches,” and legacy
tech concerns instead of raw cost/benefit or actual data.

The fact is, you’re going to make a lot more money doing much less work at
FAANG.

However, very little of what you learn about how the organization runs will be
valuable outside of the big organization itself.

------
jerrysievert
here are some things I've learned:

* politics: yes, they exist everywhere, but tend to be amplified at larger companies. polish your political skills, and one thing that I've learned is that it's important to "show, don't tell"

* fiefdoms: there are more of them, some more welcoming than others. be prepared for those that value power above all. you can't take it personally, or you'll go into a very dark place; "be the rubber duck", that is, stay floating no matter what and let the negative wash off of you like water off a duck

* duplication of effort: there likely will be tons of duplication of effort (even parallel projects doing the exact same thing), sometimes it's easy to work with others and come together for a common solution, sometimes it just plain won't happen (see fiefdoms). no real advices here, just that you need to be aware

* technology stacks: sometimes some groups will be stuck with what seem to be very old technology stacks, or things that don't seem to make any sense. look at the group you'd be joining and who they interact with, find out about the pain points before you join so you aren't surprised. even a small change can affect a lot of people at that scale, so approach changes and modernization gingerly.

~~~
maybeiambatman
> polish your political skill

Genuinely curious to know what this means.

~~~
toast0
Big companies can end up driven by incentives that are at best orthagonal to
basic economics which means you often can't convince people to do things that
make sense because they make sense.

If individuals are judged based on results against goals declared at the start
of the period, they will tend not to do anything other than that. You can't
say "the users want this", or "this will save $5 trillion dollars", or "we
can't do our job without this" because those things don't matter to
individuals. Instead, you have to argue for it to be put on a roadmap, or
convince your management to convince their management to push them to do it
sooner than 18 months from now. And you have to do it with a light touch, or
there will be resentment.

------
bengale
* Things move slowly.

* You need to be able to play the game if you're going to move up, if you want to stay in the same role don't make waves.

* Other people are playing the game. Sometimes if you're trying to make changes, even if they're going to be beneficial, you are going to run into people who have a vested interest in you not improving things. Don't let it get you down, pick your battles.

* You are way easier to replace than you think you are, don't start fights with people that can let you go. Most won't hesitate to remove you if you make their life difficult.

* Make the most of the perks and don't bust a gut, if anyone notices it'll be because you're making them look bad. Going above and beyond will earn you a pat on the head but nothing more.

* People will be doing everything they can to cover their own ass, don't let them use you for cover.

* Don't get too attached to projects, things get killed or mothballed. Years of work can just be binned without much warning. Make sure you're not defining yourself by what you're doing at work.

I've done my time at a couple of big firms and had people working with me on
teams that want to be a 'craftsman' or don't really understand these
workplaces, the thing I tell them to remember was "don't fight the waves, just
let it wash over you". You can't win, you'll just knacker yourself out and
drown.

Don't feel bad if you hate it or want to leave, it's not for everyone. Also
don't feel bad if you love it, plenty of people have much better things going
on in their life than work and are happy to coast along at a big firm doing
what needs to be done.

~~~
sizzle
I can tell that this is hard-earned wisdom from lived experiences as I nod my
head in agreement. Thanks for sharing.

------
brudgers
The biggest thing is that you don't really know anything.

_You weren't in the room when the decisions were made and there is oil tanker
momentum based on those decisions.

_You don't have a clue as to who is who. People within the organization know
each other in non-obvious ways. There is an invisible informal network built
of many years, organizational structures, and projects.

_You don't know which project is whose baby. Two equivalent approaches are not
equivalent when one has backing and the other relies on natural selection.

None of these is bad. It's just the nature of blindly encountering an
elephant. Good luck.

------
laktak
If you end up in a 'bad' company you may make these experiences:

\- there are feuds between companies or even departments in the same org

\- decisions are not based on facts but on political circumstances

\- the outcome of an analysis is often predetermined

\- not the best idea/project/etc. win's but the one with the best connections

\- decisions are made that are damaging to the company just to deny someone
else in the org a success

~~~
loopz
"You are welcome to visit anytime to provide input on how we can improve our
improvements-processes."

and

"Everyone got heard."

------
croh
I worked in small company (50-100 employees) and lead team of 7 people before.
After company went down, I joined as IC in big corps. Few things mentioned
below might not be relevant to your position. But adding them for every one.
Not all orgs are same, so take this with pinch of salt.

\- Relax, don't boil the ocean. (This is first advice given to me by one of
the director after raising concerns over dev practices being followed)

\- Learn presentation skills. Charts are important. Executives don't
understand technical language but only charts.

\- Stay humble but be political. Avoid heated arguments. Give logical choices
to people and let them choose instead of proving them wrong. Make sure to get
all discussions on mail. So if later blame game starts, you will be saved.

\- In such orgs, some folk stays for decades. They don't care about product or
team. Deal carefully with them. But then again you can find some real gems
with decades of specialist experience. Learn from them as much as possible.

\- Learn proprietary technologies. Most of time such techs are not available
for individuals or very pricy.

\- Get certifications. Big corps provide very expensive certifications with
huge discounts. (But before working on them make sure there arn't any traps.
E.g. In my org, you had to stay for atleast a year after finishing
certifications or pay back)

\- Understand KPI well. (e.g. In startup, you may get appraisal on working
hard in weekends and shipping. But in megacorps, that won't happen. You may
get some praise but not appraisal)

\- If you want recognition, try to conduct department wide technical sessions.
People will respect you in (those never ending) meetings.

\- Don't invest your emotions in projects. Sometimes they get scrapped
quarterly.

\- Welcome to world of VMs. Organizations are tuned for operations not for
engineering. (I miss my Linux)

\- Even though your performance is good, you can get canned. Layoffs are done
based on budget not on performance. Keep an eye on Gartner index. Also manager
plays key role in almost all decisions. So think once before messing with
him/her.

\- And last but not least. Don't go in comfort zone. Always keep an eye on
market & opportunities.

~~~
ricardobeat
This is an accurate description of most of the negative aspects of BigCo.

------
hoorayimhelping
> _Moreover, I don’t have a lot of reserve energy in the tank to direct it at
> another startup after 10 years of blood, sweat and toil._

> _...What are some things I should consider before switching?_

Take a break if you can afford it. I think that will serve you better than
almost any other thing you can do, work related. I've felt this way, and took
a few months off, I was champing at the bit to get back to work and start
making something happen. You'll think a lot clearer about what you want to do
next with some time away.

After you get out of a serious relationship, you need time to heal, regroup,
re-find yourself, re-learn who you are, etc before you start dating again.
It's similar with jobs you put a lot into.

~~~
fistfucker3000
I hard agree. Startups can burn you out a lot. I've been there myself. The
best position is if you can line up a start date a month or two after
quitting.

------
daxfohl
300 is already pretty big. I went from 20 years where by far my largest
company was 16 people, to Microsoft, and I'm pretty happy.

The biggest transition for me was the amount of cross org digging and asking
and such required. So much is constantly in Flux, and internal integration
points are often poorly documented or have apis based off protocols from a
decade ago, or whatever else. You spend most of your time doing that, figuring
out how to integrate with various old, half supported systems, getting
pushback that the integration won't be supportable, etc.

This is in strong contrast with a small company where you are generally
working with public, well documented tools, and everyone you work with shares
the same goal.

That said, I'm happy now that I have gotten used to it. The scale of things
you work on is much greater.

One thing I'll say is don't sell yourself short by taking a job at the low end
of where you think you should be and telling yourself that you can work your
way up. I made this mistake when I was unemployed but not desperate. Your
project could be canceled or there can be blockers or reorgs or whatever else
that keeps you back. So wait for the offer that you want.

------
borramakot
I've done a startup, a couple of midsize companies (~4k engineers), and AWS.
Just my 2c, a lot of the advice I'm seeing here applies more to the midsize
companies than at least my corner of AWS.

In my Amazon experience:

* Some very high level project requirements would come from above (e.g. after this date, internal technology X is being deprecated, so you should have a really good reason to put out a project with X).

* Otherwise, decisions were mostly made at a low level, documented, debated with the wider team for an hour, then implemented. This was a little more structured than at the startup, but most of it was that documentation and debate happened before implementation, rather than after implementation at the startup.

* Project managers were somewhat active with the team, but a lot of the features we worked on came from the engineers watching what was used, forum requests, or customer requests through other channels (e.g. conferences).

* There was a focus on getting products out quickly, but tech debt/tests/reliability was a much bigger focus than anywhere else I've been.

* The team was fairly small, and encouraged to make heavy use of other team's internal tooling/native AWS tools for anything that didn't really need to be custom. Interactions with those teams was pretty straightforward and mostly supportive- "We're using your service to do Y, and would like to do Z too, but that doesn't seem possible without some tweaks to your API/service, is that something you can put in the backlog to investigate?"

* An individual team could be quick to change, but the organization as a whole has a lot of cultural momentum in the way things are done, and it's not clear who to talk to to make recommendations. For example, at the startup, I could go to the CEO and express concerns about the newly restrictive information security policy. At Amazon, I'm probably not going to email Jeff Bezos and suggest six-pagers be made available in advance of meetings.

* Transferring teams in Amazon is mostly extremely easy

* Conversely, Conway's law applies hard in AWS- it didn't seem straightforward to offer products or features that weren't obviously under one team's purview without forming a new team.

------
sumanthvepa
Having gone the other way, from Microsoft to entrepreneurship, I would say you
are better positioned for success. For the most part your skill sets will
transfer over to product management in a large company fairly easily. Some
things are different though. You will typically be responsible for either part
of a product or one product in a portfolio. As such your product or feature's
future depends not just on how it is doing in the marketplace, but how it does
relative to other products and features in the the portfolio. So you need to
work with your managers to evangelize and promote the product within the
larger organization as well. You'll have be able to justify its existence,
very robustly with a lot of data. Much of the mid-level product managers
function within a large company comprises of this activity. This may seem
wasteful to you, coming from a startup, where the verdict of the market was
everything, but this is how large companies determine how resources are
allocated. Eventually the market will determine the future of the product, but
for many product managers in large companies, that success or failure will not
occur in the duration of their tenure. So one thing you need to focus on a lot
is networking with the internal power structures of the company to build
support for your self and your team. You have a huge advantage in this respect
as an acquisition. They have paid good money to bring your team in, so there
is significant awareness of who you are. If you are careful, and politically
savvy you can leverage that awareness, and initial goodwill into strong long
term support for your team and product.

------
kartayyar
\- Domain mastery is more important than being a jack of all trades.

\- Realize you are signing up to be part of a bigger machine, and there are
things you will have less control over. This is both limiting and empowering.

\- Both people in small and large companies can be smart, but they are
typically a different flavor of smart. Learn from them accordingly.

\- You should plan to have a much longer lead in terms of getting things done
if it requires a dependency on a team you don't work with frequently.

\- The team you work on is far more important than the company you work for.

\- Be active rather than passive about finding opportunities and projects to
work on. You can easily get stuck working in a role you might not be a fit for
or a manager you don't click with.

------
snarfy
I just started at Big Co!

For my first assignment, I had a question about an API I was supposed to use.
I was told to email Bob.

me: "Do I do A or B when using the API?"

Bob: (cc's his manager my email)

Bob's manager: Is your team suppose to be using API? (my manager cc'd)

Two weeks of infighting later, still no answer to A or B, and my task is now
past due.

~~~
blihp
Now you know not to ask that type of question there. Next assignment, just
focus on hitting your due date and use whatever API seems right to you... ask
for forgiveness later, if needed. Since you're new, you can pretty easily get
away with 'sorry about that, I didn't know I shouldn't use that API. Thanks
for letting me know!' The more important lesson I would be noting from this
experience: there's far more CYA than clarity. (typical big co) So keep your
head down and stay out of the line of fire.

------
axegon_
Here is my list.

* Things work a lot more slowly in big co's.

* There's a lot more ego involved so prepare for a lot of ass lickers(I really can't think of a better term).

* A lot of "meetings", "discussions", "planning" and so on, which often are just means to kick a can down the road.

* More time to relax.

* Nearly impossible to change the status quo, not impossible but a very slow and painful process.

* Often more freedom to experiment with technologies and proprietary solutions if you find a way to justify them(which is often not a difficult task).

* Plenty of ways to squeeze out training, seminars, certifications and whatnot, just make sure you read the tiny font at the bottom.

------
AnimalMuppet
There are systems and processes for _everything_. The plus of that is that
there's a lot less winging it, and that you can just hand a bunch of stuff off
to people that know how to do it. The minus is that you have to learn who
those people are and how to activate them, and it can take longer than just
doing it yourself.

------
kbos87
Great topic, and I’d say there are already some signs you are asking the right
questions. A few of my own thoughts:

Use your capital constrained mindset productively, but be attuned to when to
shut it off. Being able to do a lot with a little can be a positive trait
inside a larger company (e.g., early days on an unproven project), but you
need to recognize when capital should be applied so you don’t risk unknowingly
playing small ball.

There is something to be said for another commenter’s suggestion to “relax” a
little bit. You’ll need to, because larger companies move more slowly. Be
willing to push, but recognize that there are limits to what a large org can
do in a short amount of time. That’s just reality.

Try your best to adopt a longer term mindset. In a smaller company you are
often focused on what’s happening right now - larger companies have more space
and more runway to think over longer arcs of time. What are the implications
of what you are doing now a year, or even three years out?

------
fsloth
"Corporate Confidential" by Cynthia Shapiro is an excellent book in explaining
the various motivations stakeholders at a large company may or may not have.

Although the book can be considered bleak, the point is not to train you to
suspect your employer, but rather point out various possibilities of politics
and power play that may be going on under the surface that are not so obvious
from the get go. I.e. it's a survival manual of sorts to a new and sometimes
semi-hostile environment.

------
jefftk
The biggest difference I've seen is around product maturity. At a startup you
typically have something very new and no reputation. You have to move very
quickly to build it out and expand, and you sacrifice a lot to make this
happen.

At a big company you're typically working on something much more mature,
making lots of money, with many users who rely on it. You still need to make
it better, but it's now much more important not to break what's already
working. Even if your project is a new one, you still have the company's
reputation to protect so you don't hurt existing products. Different companies
handle this different ways (I lean towards investing in efficient end-to-end
testing and experimentation) but all the options here trade velocity for
reliability.

------
tallanvor
> All I’ve ever learnt over the last decade has been by > operating in a
> capital constrained environment.

Even in big companies you will be constrained by budgets, and possibly even
more than you're used to. The big companies have money to try many different
things, but normally products start small, and can be killed if they're not
going to be profitable enough. Especially if you're ina leadership position,
you're going to have to convince people to fund your products.

The other big thing to consider is politics. Don't get me wrong, politics are
everywhere, even in startups, but there's a difference. You're going to have
arguments with people that you can't go have a beer with after work, and you
have to consider how that will affect your relationship after the argument.

------
qqj
Politics.

You better brush up on your social engineering, learn when to smile and when
not to, and watch your back. Rationality and intelligence will not get you far
on their own, because the game isn't about who's the smartest or who has the
best ideas, it's about leverage, prejudices, cliques, "prestige", and
ultimately money.

Remember you're there to play with some toys, occasionally commit code, and
get that sweet money.

~~~
greenie_beans
lol, that last sentence is me rn!

------
dutchrapley
Office politics.

Culture. The fact that it doesn't matter what the company says their culture
is and that their culture is defined by the behaviors that they do and don't
allow in the workplace. Culture can vary from team to team and department to
department.

Deadweight. The organization is going to be full of dead weight.

Get ready to feel under-appreciated and under-valued.

~~~
dlhavema
We refer to the dead weight as riders. they're just riding along for the
journey but they don't actually provide any actual value to the company. At a
startup, those are the first people to go during layoffs or during other
downturns. At a larger company they can stick around a lot longer.

------
LockAndLol
Watch Office Space [0]. It'll teach you everything you'll ever need to know
about big corps.

There will be office politics, somebody will always either be too hot or too
cold in the office, connections will be much more important than talent...
yeah, especially that last one. If you want to get anything done in a big
company and have any sort of leverage anywhere, connections, connections,
connections.

You might get a meek yearly review just because someone in your echelon has
cozied up to somebody in a higher echelon and wants a raise.

There might be a company-wide call for product-ideas with the promise of
leading your own team should your idea be selected. To be fair, that does
happen but the best ideas will be rejected by the committee and then
resubmitted as their own.

Whichever company you pick, read the glassdoor reviews and look for stories on
reddit and HN. I don't have any links handy but over the years there have been
quite a few on reddit about the company structure in GAFAM (Google, Amazon,
Facebook, Microsoft). These pictures [1] remind me most of those.

[0]:
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804)
[1]: [https://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2011/7/5/organizational-
char...](https://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2011/7/5/organizational-charts-
google-amazon-apple-facebook-oracle-an.html)

------
ensiferum
You didn't mention your role and I expect the experience to be somewhat
difference depending where you end up in the hierarchy. Generally I'd say that
the higher you are the more bullshit and bullshit work there is.

* In big corp there are a bunch of people who are actively just making a living and career out of shit talking and being in the right spot of the machinery doing very little actual work.

* There can be lots of redundant work and other inefficient waste. For example double/triple bug/task tracking systems, several different repositories with half assed mirrors etc.

* There are "gate keepers" who have been at the BigCorp for a hundred years and have managed to put themselves in a position where they get to act as the gate keeper of access to some resource. Examples are some "enterprise" level CVS tools like ClearCase where there's some "merge/release manager" who gets to do branches and merges and releases etc. These people will _vehemently_ resist any change to make these processes more efficient. (see the point about efficiency)

* Some people exist in the organization just to make a career using whatever means possible including bullying, politics, (passive) aggression towards others (trying to sabotage their work, take credit for it), ass kissing, nepotism etc.

------
stuaxo
Half the job when trying to get something done, is working out who to speak
to.

You'll find out this stuff by a sort of osmosis, there isn't really one person
who knows stuff, you just sort of bump into the useful person eventually.

Keep track of names and acronyms, there will be lots of both.

------
kajumix
A large company generally has more money. I work for a faang, and appreciate
that it doesn't take much to spin up big ec2 clusters as personal sandboxes,
get licenses for pricey productivity software, fly out to conferences, or take
costly risks. If you're creative, you'll find niches of freedom in a big
company (flush with cash) that is hard to imagine in a small one. You could
feel like a cog in the machine, but that's a matter of perspective. Your
team's goals can be subsumed under the obscure goals of the entire company and
you may feel distant from an actual impact, but you can choose to view your
team as a machine, and not a cog, with its own set of constraints. In a way,
even if I don't comprehend the 'why' of a certain goal, I will take it as a
given, and still find it fulfilling to problem-solve my way towards it. I
don't get why so many people insist on being able to influence goals,
directions, etc of their company. I say give me a puzzle to solve, and if it's
fun, I won't dwell on the 'why' for too long. It may seem apathetic. My
passion doesn't have to be visible all the time.

------
marceloabsousa
From your context description it sounds like you need some extended holidays
to put things in perspective.

For me, the biggest difference is that processes in a big co are designed for
any single individual to be replaceable. As a consequence, everything is
bigger than you and slower to change even if for the best. This is exactly
what you're trying to achieve in a successful start-up as it starts with
everyone being irreplaceable (to some extent) where you can make a fundamental
difference in the future of the company.

Being part of a successful company sounds exciting and you can learn valuable
information to apply in other settings but I found that in start-ups you have
a lot more room to learn than in a big co. This is because instability in a
start-up is very visible and directly accessible (you'll run out of money in X
months) so you must timebox everything. However, in a big co instability is
more implicit and you can't fail as much. Also unless you can get a fairly
high level position at a big co, you won't be able to get "very" relevant
experience into building/working the right product because a lot of strategy
is not discussed bottom-up in those companies.

------
mh8h
Prepare for the performance review from day one. Create a folder in your mail
client or google doc to keep quotes providing feedback to you, or to keep
track of what you have to say about others.

------
mywacaday
Don't just dive straight into whatever you're asked to do, take a bit of time
to understand the department/division/company structure. Try to get a mentor
assigned for the first six months, ideally someone from a similar role but NOT
your department. Get them to help you navigate and understand the
organisation/policies/procedures/key players. In a large company you can be
hammered for not following procedure, if you are following procedure you are
safe.

This is my own advice to myself, after changing industry four years ago I'm
moving to a new company but same industry next month. These are some of my
biggest take aways after going in to recover from a everyone got hit by the
metaphorical bus scenario with not hand over and little support. I'm probably
a bit on the negative side but I think the advice holds up either way.

------
georgeecollins
Try to intuit what your boss and your part of the organization really values.
By that I mean what they like and reward, not what they say is important.
Understand the difference.

Having a quirk or two is fine, it shows confidence. But you cannot be out of
step in too many things, even if it compromises your effectiveness.

------
rkangel
Your personal development is your responsibility. Figure out how the system
works and make sure to take advantage of it.

Any big org will have its system for personal development and advancement.
These vary wildly in how well they work and how fair they are. You will have a
line manager who's job is in theory to help you develop. They also vary wildly
in how helpful they are (middle managers who benefit by keeping good people on
their team and so preventing them getting promotions is a classic bad big
company problem).

Understand the development system. Understand the metrics and make sure that
you do work to check the boxes. Just doing your job well probably won't work
on its own to get pay rises and promotions. Every metrics system has its
weaknesses - game them to the degree that you consider ethical.

------
loopz
Ask people around you, what would they expect from you and your role?
(Remember you're new here and unfamiliar with this position and role!1)

If they don't expect much, focus elsewhere. Prepare for disappointments, but
if you can keep asking and looking, there'll be no lack of opportunity later.

There may be different periods in your worklife, where you focus on different
aspects of work. Don't be disappointed in yourself, but recognize different
skills and tools are needed to fill the toolbox. What is important to the
corporation is getting the jobs done, not fill your CV. Nobody will care if
you do it right or not, but doing it wrong will hinder further development. So
getting stuck in quagmire or bubble, is poor job-protection, as at some point
in time things will be changed from under your feet.

------
ghaff
I'm not primarily a developer but from the perspective of going from a very
small firm for almost 10 years to a multi-thousand person company. (I also
worked for a similar order of magnitude firm in a prior life).

\-- There's lots of machinery to support you in various ways. You don't need
to do it all yourself. This makes it possible to do things at a scale it's
often hard to do at a small company.

\-- It depends on the role of course, but harnessing that machinery,
coordinating, and getting the word out about _anything_ across the company
takes a lot of effort. People are specialized and it's hard to get them to pay
attention to things that are not of immediate importance to their job.

------
tombert
I have no idea if you're anything like me, but when I moved to a big megacorp,
the thing that caught me off guard is how often you're expected to check and
respond to emails.

In a smaller environment, if you have an email that slipped past you,
typically someone will just ping you or bother you in person to ask you
something, but in a megacorp that's simply not going to fly.

We can actually abstract that a bit; if you're not used to having a lot of
imposed structure and restrictions, moving to a megacorp is going to be
initially difficult for you. I've been at mine for about two years, and I only
recently feel like I've found a workable pattern.

------
alexbanks
Everything moves slower than you're used to, probably by a tremendous amount.
You don't have to have those expectations for yourself, and you shouldn't have
them for the people around you.

Politics are the most important thing with respect to large groups of people.
Your ideas will matter less than who you are and the clout you carry. Always
be paying attention to who is asking for things and why they might be asking
those things. At bigger companies, people's personal agendas may trump company
agendas, and you may have to pick and choose which projects are worth taking
(after understanding the who and the why).

------
ramanujank
Having gone through a similar experience, I would say that your experience may
vary depending on org culture, sub-culture within individual teams, and the
traits of your manager. That said, there are always loose ends that will need
ownership and that's where your "entrepreneurial" chops would kick in. You
approach to execution would/should reflect on the lessons you've learnt.

Startup - Enterprise does not mean a paradigm shift in everything. Yes, there
are some aspects that would change. And then there will be a lot of scope for
applying your self-made learning and leanings.

------
blackoil
Work is not everything, learn rest of "political" skills if you are not good
at them, like presentation, speaking, writing.

Most big corps have done really smart people, don't be afraid to actively seek
to learn from them.

~~~
systematical
This is good advice, these are all areas where I have improved.

------
yanjost
Endless meetings with too much people, nobody listening and taking
responsibility

Everybody CCing the world to cover their asses

Being switched from a project to another because of reorganisation

Your project being cancelled because “not a priority”

------
sbilstein
Like others have said, RELAX!!!

You don't need to push too hard to succeed. Not rocking the boat (too much) is
more important than anything else. You can push teams to greater efficiencies,
products to better outcomes, etc. but do this in a slow and methodical way.
You won't get any benefit from being frustrated and neither will those around
you.

------
kwillets
What I did most recently was to start out as a contractor and get a feel for
the place. I found a good fit with some other skills (started out as a Vertica
admin and got drafted to do some C++/SIMD work, and some stats, and now DW
design/dev).

In the end I looked for the same things you would at a startup: growth,
revenue, and technical fit, and found a good opportunity within a huge
multinational. I've since filed a couple of (provisional) patents, and we're
growing like crazy, so our exec got promoted.

We still have a lot of issues like others describe here with Conway's law,
inter-group coordination, and so on, but we have clear goals and metrics.

In contrast, I had a previous job at Microsoft that completely stagnated, even
as the rest of the company was booming. It really depends on the opportunity.

------
goddamnsteve
Bias. A huge deal in these corporates. You’re going to have to either learn
how to navigate it or to live with it.

On the other hand, you will get a ton of exposure learning from others and
knowing more people. That’s always there for sure at large organizations.
Above all, a sense of being a part of a cult.

------
LatteLazy
Competence is irrelevant, popularity and being on message are all that matter
from here.

------
localhost
It’s all about trade offs. You will have a tremendous amount of leverage at a
big co. Customers who would otherwise not give you the time of the day at a
startup will be happy to talk to you. Take advantage of this and learn from
them.

On the other hand you will also have to pay taxes at a big co. Big co got that
way in many cases because they have an integrated solution for customers.
Integration is expensive but worth it. It takes a lot of people to be in
alignment to make integration work. And that takes time; you need to be
patient and look for opportunities to make a difference.

------
thrwn_frthr_awy
My experience has been work life balance is better at big co. Benefits
typically better. Total comp typically better. Work satisfaction is worse.
Innovation is worse. Security, hosting, open source are worse.

------
RockIslandLine
"All I’ve ever learnt over the last decade has been by operating in a capital
constrained environment."

That won't necessarily change in a big corporate environment. Management can
be surprisingly resistant to approving funding requests.

We had significant problems getting the purchase of android and iOS devices
approved for product testing, for instance. I'm certain that the human time
spent getting the purchase approved cost far more than the actual purchase.

------
nanna
I don't work in the tech field, I work in a large university, and so much of
this advice rings true. The university truly is a corporation.

------
Frank93
A large company provides lots of opportunities to acquire diplomacy and
political skills. Large companies do not move at such a reckless pace so you
have time to learn and reflect. Large companies tend to move in a slow,
consensual way without taking risks. Sometimes this is actually a good thing

------
BenderV
Lots of people are arguing really valid points. I recently switched to a Big
Co after 4 start-ups - so I get /it/. I'm just wondering what part is due to
inefficiency creeping in VS due to the size of an organisation.

Point being: what about SpaceX, Tesla or Stripe ?

Are they also slow ? with politics and no transparency & co ?

~~~
bengale
I'd love to read some studies on this to be honest. My guess would be that a
certain size its impossible to not have the kind of bullshit this thread is
full of.

I'd wonder if it's a related to the age of the company though, or maybe the
speed of growth. It's always felt to me like a company seems to hit a critical
mass of, shall we say less than productive people, that then work together to
hire more people like them and drive out people that want to make changes.
Then it just snowballs.

------
pmontra
Read this to get familiar with the environment

[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
principle-...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-
the-office-according-to-the-office/)

------
zwischenzug
I wrote a little about this here

[https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/10/02/why-are-enterprises-
so-s...](https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/10/02/why-are-enterprises-so-slow/)

------
random_upvoter
Not everyone you meet has good intentions for you, your projects or the
company.

------
pcannons
This post is relevant and made it to page 2 recently:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23305216](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23305216)

------
mackbrowne
I find a lot of these things you can expect, are just symptoms of an
inefficient company. I wonder if there is a big company out there that moves
quicker and cares about their individual employees more?

------
VirajMa
I personally think that one should always look behind from where they are
coming and focus on tomorrow. This will help them achieve their goals, both
short terms, and long terms.

------
DenisM
What is your goal? Make a career or build cool stuff or ...?

These are very different activities, not in the activities and efforts so much
but in choosing where to focus those efforts.

------
giantg2
You will probably have less freedom, less authority, and more bureaucracy.

You might have a leg up when it comes to keeping your budget low. Upper
management is always happy with that.

~~~
akamia
I once worked at a Fortune 50 company where keeping your budget low was
something that upper management (at a certain level) was not happy with. We
once built a hadoop cluster because we needed to "burn" some money (~$150k)
left in our budget. In this company coming in under budget meant you didn't do
a good job of forecasting your needs so you were punished with budget cuts the
following year. That led to so much waste. Coming from a startup where saving
a few hundred dollars/months was something to celebrate it was mind-boggling
to see all of the waste.

------
stuaxo
In lots of places, getting anything done can take _so_ long.

You may also fine that there are people with many many reasons why you can't
just do things, a fear and inertia.

Good luck!

------
technicolorwhat
Expect some resistance for very productive and crazy ideas

------
jkingsbery
My background: I spent most of my career (starting in 2008) working at a few
different startups, but have spent the past 4 years working for one of the big
tech companies.

There's actually a lot that's the same. If you were hired by a large tech
company, they think you can do your main thing (write code, think through
product strategy, whatever) well. Most of how you do that thing doesn't
change.

You're still working with people. People everywhere are more-or-less the same.
Some bosses do a good job encouraging debate/disagreement, some less so, but
that's true both at large companies and start-ups.

There's a lot of pressure that comes with working at a startup where a release
determines whether the company will continue to have money, something you
don't have to worry about as much in a large company. But life in a large
company is often capital constrained in a similar way. In a large company, the
set of pressures is different (keeping costs down in order to be more
profitable, as opposed to being limited by what check VCs wrote), but you
still have some budget you're working against, timelines, and the possibility
of your team being defunded.

At a big company, you have to distinguish between where your team is in the
product lifecycle. Some teams are developing new products. Working for these
teams feels a lot like working at a start-up, and comes with many similar
challenges. It does have some other challenges - you have pre-defined
standards for what it means for something to be ready for launch, but you also
have a larger network to draw from in order to get you there.

For established products at a large company, the tolerance for risk is much
lower. Other commenters have said "well, you're just a cog in the machine
now," but this risk tolerance indicates the opposite: your one-line code
change or that feature you designed can make life better for thousands of
people, or it can make life a nightmare. There's a lot of individual
responsibility that comes with that.

At a large company, be prepared to spend longer thinking through your ideas
and defending them to others. This comes with trade-offs: you are forced to
think through your ideas, making them clearer and better along the way (good),
but also may spend less time on that then writing code (bad).

At least at the large company I work for, I've found the standards are much
more consistent. I spent the first 8.5 years of my career
defending/recommending/arguing for the use of unit tests (of course, being
pragmatic with it, when it's helpful, and all the other caveats that ought to
come with that). I have not had that debate in 4 years - engineers here
understand why we need unit tests (and code reviews, design reviews, coding
standards, linters, automated builds...). I think this has a lot to do with
the culture and one group of employees learning the lessons from a previous
group, but for whatever reason it might be it does make life easier to take
certain standards for granted.

At a large company, the access to experts is pretty amazing. If you don't know
how to do something - how to fix an issue with your service, how to get
started in new technology, conduct a particular kind of user study, etc. -
there's very likely someone who does know that is an email send away. At a
start-up, even a larger O(100's) people start-up, your network is more
limited.

At least at the large tech company I work for, when people are ready for
something new, that usually means moving within the company. This isn't
usually an option at a start-up. This means that all that stuff you learned
about the company's special ways of doing things maintain transferrable for
longer.

I've found an entrepreneurial approach can be valuable at a larger company. At
the company I work for, it's not unheard of for new ideas to go to market in
the matter of months, but very often management looks for successful
milestones at a rate not that different from what startup management or VCs
look for: some kind of 2-3 year plan of where you want to end up, and with a
milestone release within the next 6-12 months, closed betas before that, etc.
All the same things apply about knowing your customer (who, in this case,
might be someone else inside the company), understand the customers' needs,
start with a problem and not a solution, and all that.

One of the biggest differences has been navigating the corporate structure. At
a 300 person company, you probably know who to go to for any possible problem
you can imagine. At a large tech company, you probably don't know who to talk
to, and you _might not even know who to talk to in order to find out who to
talk to._ Finding the right person to talk to is more of a skill in these
larger settings, and it helps to understand the corporate structure, what are
the different teams working on similar kinds of things as your team, and all
that sort of thing.

So, that's a bunch of things, let me know if there's some other aspect of the
switch you're curious about.

------
rotrux
Patience and Compromise are your two new best friends.

------
tehlike
I just left Google, for facebook about 3 months ago. In case you are
interested in comparison, i can help.

------
Account123481-x
if you have a soul, losing it.

------
dandersh
I worked about 3.5 years at 2 huge companies, one as an employee (company #1)
and the other as a consultant (company #2) as a developer.

There will often be inertia, delays, and even silence when having to go
through organizational processes. It took almost 2 weeks for me to receive my
laptop at company 1, and then I sat waiting for a week for word of security
clearance for a piece of software. At company 2 I started applying for
internal full-time positions a month and half before my contract was not going
to be renewed (more on that later). I got a single in person interview (after
waiting a month for pointless phone screens) my final week. The first few
weeks after I left I was getting pinged asking for phone screens on positions
I had applied to earlier.

There will be key people who carry tremendous weight politically, fiscally,
and operationally. Finding them and making yourself visible/useful will be
tremendously beneficial. I was lucky that both people who interviewed me fit
this bill. I ended up getting moved into better, more enjoyable roles as a
result. The security clearance I mentioned previously was resolved within a
few hours of my direct manager emailing the security team manager (who she
knew) asking what the status was (I was denied and they never bothered to
inform me). These people are valuable for getting you where you want to be in
the company, and tend to be more visible internally which is likely to make
you more visible as well if you working with/for them.

There are going to be organizational decisions that are inexplicable, and
there are limitations to the power of the people I mentioned above. At company
2 the first team I was on was one of 5 that were working on a single web
product. The product lead was invaluable due to his domain knowledge and
product skill. When I talked to him my final week he told me he was being
moved onto another team during a key phase of his current product. The final
team I was on myself and another dev was ineligible for FTE because we weren't
physically located in one of the 3 areas the team members were located, even
though the entire team itself was remote and they had been unable to hire new
developers for the past couple of months that we were there.

Sometimes the company is rigid to the point of it being painful, and you're
told "That's just how we do it here". We were expected to release a fully
fleshed out, bug free product by a set date with zero wiggle room. This
happened despite not having anyone to onboard it to for almost a month after
release, after which it was barely used because the company decided to focus
their efforts elsewhere.

Make a point to have a solid grasp of what is going on in other teams and the
company at large. This will help you in seeing any funding/resource changes
coming that will directly impact you.

Be mindful of politics and pick your battles wisely. You may not want to do
one or both, but knowing who pulls great weight and who is aligned with who
should keep your role cleaner.

There are likely going to be people who don't pull their weight, and they can
even be above you in rank. Often times this is well known and there are
reasons why, even if it's something as silly as the company doesn't fire FTE.

Meetings. There will be more of them than are needed, longer than is needed,
and where you aren't needed.

Sometimes teams/groups can have drastic culture changes from the company at
large. It can be remote vs in-office, everyone on the team works daily
together in a large office (ugh), communication styles (email vs chat vs
phone), lunch together/alone, etc.

