Title: I work at a startup with ~50 employees (and have always worked at startups). Love the work and the people. Recently we were acquired by $LARGE_CORPORATION and the experience has been a living hell for all of us. Things that should take a few days take a few weeks. Things that should take a few weeks take a few quarters. It&#x27;s slowly driving me insane.<p>The experience is best shared as a story.<p>I&#x27;m working on migrating our apps to the parent company&#x27;s VM launching and deploy platform. Should be fairly straightforward, I think. Unfortunately, the deploy tooling isn&#x27;t entirely compatible with our app so I ask the team if they can implement $X feature to support our app.<p>The first engineer I talk to doesn&#x27;t even attempt to answer my question but redirects me to their manager. Ok, that&#x27;s odd, I think, but whatever.<p>Manager says sure, just fill out this feature request doc. It&#x27;s a Google Docs template with 4 (!) pages of required documentation to just explain why I want this feature implemented. It asks for my team name, the motivation, why I can&#x27;t solve the problem some other way, yada yada...ok, I guess it&#x27;s good to document your work, so sure. I fill it out and submit it.<p>No response after two days. Then I get an automated email that their <i>skip</i> level manager has approved the work. Huh? This is followed by an email that the team&#x27;s eng manager approved the work. Why do two layers of management need to approve work on something they have no knowledge about?<p>Finally, after many rounds of arguing about why this needs to be done in the first place (ahem: you told us to migrate to your platform, and it literally does not work for our app), they quote us a delivery timeline of <i>end of Q1 in 2022</i>.<p>At this point I am in absolute shock. This should take no more than a few days to implement.<p>So I reach out to the manager and ask what is going on. This is a simple task, I said. Why does it take an entire quarter for your team to deliver? He doesn&#x27;t have an answer.<p>I tell him I&#x27;m happy to fix the issue myself, if they link me to the relevant codebase. &quot;It shouldn&#x27;t be too hard to dig in and submit a patch,&quot; I think to myself. He says he cannot give me access to the codebase for compliance reasons, and that only members of his team have R&#x2F;W on that repo. What???<p>This is insane. And this entire time I was only alllowed to interact with managers and have not spoken to a single engineer about the actual technical details. It is impossible to get anything <i>done</i> here now.<p>Is this how it&#x27;s like at all large companies? What should I do?
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