Ask HN: How to be happy in a corporate environment? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to be happy in a corporate environment?

5 pointshdndjsbbs6 comments

Hi HN,

I'm a fairly senior dev (10+ years) but I've never gotten the hang of working in a bigger company. I tend to be good at building and exploration in a way that is valuable at startups, but I go a little crazy in a corporate environment where there isn't seemingly a lot to do. The few times I've worked at a larger company I bailed pretty quickly because I felt anxious, despite my managers and team being sad to see me go.

I'm currently back in a BigCorp kind of role and feeling the same anxiety. There are lots of technical issues within the company but the primary blockers are politics and internal barriers. It feels like I could spend 80% of my time doing nothing and I would do fine on perf reviews, but that is stressful to me personally.

Has anyone successfully made the switch from builder/startup early employee to BigCorp cog? Advice?

View on HN

My few cents:

1. Visibility over actual completion of work (presentations, sessions, etc.,)

2. Communication (mainly over email! because email is used as a golden truth when there is a conflict between individuals or teams)

3. Getting to know other members/teams (you don't know when you will end up collaborating with them)

4. Being thorough with reviews (be it code or ideas)

5. Proactively participate in meetings (1. to grab the opportunity 2. refuse to take up the work which is not actually yours)

6. 1x1s - if the manager/management doesn't see your name often you end up in the list (you know what list)

7. Before asking questions in the Slack channel or meetings or an email (do the groundwork, a basic question from a senior will cost a lot)

8. OOO - religiously setting out-of-office saves you lot of troubles

9. Collaboration is only on paper, actually you should put a border around your team and work to guard what's rightfully yours, otherwise the other team will showcase it as theirs!

10. Don't respond on weekends, even if it will break the company. Once you set the bar, you will be expected to live within that bar.

11. There is nothing like "this is critical", what's critical will always have some buffer, tell the truth and ask for extension.

12. Don't go harsh on anyone in a corporate environment, because you will end up working with that person.

13. Attend org wide presentations, you get to know something new or you get to know whom to reach out for what or you get to know what shouldn't be presented

Make yourself useful to the right people at the right time. Pretty quickly you’ll be able to work across many teams on many problems. This is cool because in a startup you simply don’t get the same amount of exposure. It’s always the same product. Instead of looking to fix the systemic issues or looking to do politics, tackle one problem your team has and you’ll do well in no time. Different kind of work but can be rewarding

I have jumped on a few unglamorous tasks to make life better for my team but it's very much "glue work" that doesn't seem to lead to more opportunities.

I see it as a small co and startup kind of thing. When I was small I had a summer working at a grocery store where they weren't really hiring but they owed me a favor so I got attached 50% to front end and 50% to the store manager and I

- painted a metal strip that ran around the building

- cleaned the floor

- got called up one day to work in the deli and they taught me how to work the meat slicer

- got called up one day to work in the bakery, etc.

I felt it was a great experience working for startups and I know other people got similar experiences working at little beach stores and the like. I think this has gone out of fashion so one of my pet peeves is that young people working at startups take their job titles too seriously and don't have the attitude that you just do whatever it takes to move the ball forward.

In big co's you are really right that doing the work that falls through the cracks is often not valued and can even get you in trouble in the long term.

I'd say a big organization is a bunch of little organizations. What matters is: "do you like your boss?" and "how does your team work together?"

That feeling that you can't run at full speed is common in that kind of role but working in startups or other small co's you can have just as much or more dysfunction: you can run yourself ragged or feel like you're in a magically productive team or even both at the same time.

I have two relatives who work at a major online retailer that has 'Z' in the name and one of them is thrilled to go to work each day and the other just had a nervous breakdown because they had her doing three people's roles. The situation you have where you feel unproductive but the people around you think you are is pretty common because of the economics of scale: if you are working at a 100x bigger company that software you work on can have 100x the economic impact that it would for the smaller company. So a big company can have an organization that seems unproductive based on your instincts working at small companies but you are creating enough value to pay you so you are doing fine. [1]

If you have some slack, don't feel bad using it in a way that is meaningful and restorative to you and keeps you in fine condition to do what your organization needs of you.

[1] A friend of mine quoted Marx and said I was being ripped off because I was getting paid less than the value I made and I told him... I've tried the alternative and it usually ends up as hell on Earth.

This is a good point - I don't dislike my boss or my team but I'm frustrated by them at times.

I'm not running at full speed by any means, my main goal is to have _something_ to report at stand-ups. And ideally something bigger to put in a year end review.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com