[nemo44x]

Better for your wallet, but worse for the job. The company changes. The type of people it attracts to leadership roles are not the kind of people you’d start a company with. They bring their “processes and methods” that they promise will scale the company and then they insulate themselves by hiring their friends to report to them. The culture is corrupt at this point and the technologists that built the company begin moving on to new challenges and you see an accelerating attrition. But the new leadership doesn’t mind as it removes credible threats to their questionable abilities. And they can backfill with more friends/lackies loyal to them.

Within a few years post IPO the Composition of the company will have totally changed. The special place becomes a regular corporation. The hyenas will try to move on to the next Prize.

[Moto7451]

For what it’s worth the same people with the same sales pitch came in several years pre-IPO at my work. Ultimately they will come anywhere there is a lot of money to be made. Their replacements have their own processes and methods for scaling. Once those people move on the replacements will bring in a third round of this and so on.

[ghaff]

That seems… cynical. The sorts of processes and. Management needed for a larger company are different than those at a small one. You need more process. There’s no way around it.

[V99]

It may be cynical but it's also totally true.. I've personally gone through this whole cycle two separate times from smallish company -> private sale -> IPO shortly after. (~30th engineer in one and 11yrs, then day-one for the other and 7yrs).

Say you joined a company relatively early. If you're still around years later by an IPO, you probably liked that early environment where you had low-to-no management overhead, large direct impact, and everybody was personally invested in getting shit done. For most employees that environment was already slipping away pre-IPO, but you know you're close to the finish line and can't get off now. What remains is quickly going to be gone post-IPO.

The early employees get major cash-outs; some probably don't need to work at all anymore, so those that treat their job as a means-to-an-end and not their identity leave immediately. Maybe there's big incentives to stay for a few years, paid out annually, hung over your head so you don't quit immediately. But after a year of more managers and TPS reports and public company corporate governance you get your payout... That annual bonus structure practically forces you to decide if you want to leave now, or signup for a whole 'nother year of this, so a wave of people leave. After a 2nd year of this they're mostly gone to greener pastures.

Less-early employees still get significant cash-outs in a large event like this. Maybe they use it to take some time off, it's been a long few years. Once you're out for a while, why not look at what else is out there on the market. Some of them find out they liked this new big-company stuff and want more of it, so they'll probably stay for years. Others are like the early employees and want the good-old days back, they have to go find it somewhere else.

[nemo44x]

The golden handcuffs can be pure torture. Your soul is being ripped out daily as the new leaders destroy anything that was great about the place. You go to an event and you can't even recognize the place anymore; interlopers everywhere and you're the outsider. You smile and cheerfully agree with them about "how amazing the culture is here" even though they've ruined it already.

But you're 2 months away from an early RSU grant from vesting you a few hundred thousands dollars on top of the ISO's you haven't cashed out yet. But eventually the right opportunity comes your way and everyone is shocked you're leaving like you were when a legendary person left 6 months earlier. You take a pay cut and probably worse benefits and more ISO's than you could imagine to join that series a or b startup you connected with as soulmates and it's going to be OK.

[ghaff]

I’m not sure we’re disagreeing. Yes larger public companies are different from startups both because of the larger part and the public part. I haven’t gone through an IPO but I have gone through significant growth as a public companies. A lot of things change. Not necessarily for the worse. But it’s different.

[V99]

That is totally true and those may be great for the growth of the company. But as the parent was saying they are generally worse for the day-to-day job of the old-guard employees, and that's why most of them leave soon after.

[mschuster91]

> The sorts of processes and. Management needed for a larger company are different than those at a small one. You need more process. There’s no way around it.

There is: don't go public or issue stocks. In Germany, we are famous for non-public companies: the "Mittelstand" is largely owned by the founders or their descendants, which frees them from a lot of external influences - for better (companies can focus on long term goals instead of phony quarterly/activist investor-driven "KPI/OKR" goals, companies save on a lot of the bureaucracy that the law mandates for public/share-issuing companies) or worse (we're notorious for a lack of digitalization and progress as well as inheritance squabbles).

An example are the retail chains ALDI and LIDL or manufacturers Bosch and Heraeus - all tens to hundreds of thousands of employees and many billions of net worth, but it's rare to even find somewhat reliable numbers on them.

[ghaff]

You don’t have some of the compliance requirements then but you absolutely still need a lot of process if you have 10s to 100s of thousands of employees.

[Moto7451]

And a lot of it is driven by compliance obligations as a public company. If you don’t want SOX work and processes, don’t go public (or work at a startup that’s about to go public). If you don’t want SOC2 work, don’t go after large companies.

[zaphar]

SOX work can be such a shock to a company the first time around. Because many of the systems have not had to meet these obligations before they typically aren't built in a way to control scope and SOX tends to bleed into places where it seems like it really shouldn't.

Those systems and processes are critical to staying out of trouble with the law after going public.

[ghaff]

SOX is one thing. But you also probably get your sales systems and management, demand generation, sales enablement, expense control, etc. etc. better systematized. And yes it changes things. A lot of people who like small companies don’t like larger ones because things have to operate differently.

[BenoitEssiambre]

I mean, Jeff Bezos's company became somewhat large while being managed like a startup on its first day.

[verve_rat]

I haven't worked at Amazon or anything, but I'm pretty sure that is a lie they tell themselves to make them feel better.

[wittycardio]

And working for a company with lots of process kind of sucks that's also just true

[jordanbeiber]

I really would like to challenge this. There’s many times no need, but busywork have to feed busywork.

[ghaff]

If you're at a large company, the only thing worse than dealing with processes is dealing with the chaos you have in the absence of processes with everyone running around doing their own thing. (Obviously there can be bad process as well.)

[dilyevsky]

Those aren’t really related everyone can be running around doing their own thing (but slower) with a process - that’s usually a sign of leadership vacuum not absence of the process.

[jordanbeiber]

This is why self-leadship is vital to “agility” - individual interaction before process and tools.

Someone wrote, perhaps Tom DiMarco: “a process is per definition not agile”.

[jordanbeiber]

I’m not saying ”no processes are needed” - I’m saying at big companies many redundant processes are never questioned.

Too many processes are never automated, and people are assigned to manually enforce and follow up on processes, that should be completely automatic.

This is where process busywork creates yet further busywork. Prime example? ITIL (as this is an IT focused site many probably have heard of it).

If you don’t automate the heck out of ITIL you reduces quality, slow any pace down and the mess remains.