It took us 6 months to find, renovate, and move into a new office. If they're adding as many people as they claim, that's more than enough time to go from "we're going to need to upsize soon" to "we needed to upsize months ago".
If you interact with such a bigger company than your own it is normal that things can take 6-12 months. It's a good opportunity to harden your business against it. Nobody likes to do that, but if you want to survive you have to.
Can't agree to this more. And depending on the size of the company, it might not be just few weeks, things which you would think should have been done in a month might take up to a year. And meanwhile everyone WILL keep talking about moving fast.
People will keep coming in and going out and you would end up have the same conversation with many people many times. And everyone will try to suggest "one change" at a time.
And there is nothing wrong with all this. This is just how big companies work, you cant fast-forward any of it.
Yeah, size is one matter, technology focus is another one.
We've been acquired by a bigger shop with a lot less technology focus and exactly what you're describing is already happening. Things that should take 2 month waiting for customers already takes 1 month of planning and 2 month of scheduling the person that might be able to schedule the task of 2 month within the next 6 month or more probably never. It's a soft spot for me atm, because if that's the new norm, it'll be time to leave a lot of work behind.
I clearly remember estimating something with a manager at a previous job, saying it will take 2 weeks. His response was, that's too long, let's try 2 days and see what happens.
An apt and constructive criticism. Thank you for it. I am part of the problem, undoubtedly, but unfortunately when I do try to pad my estimates, I usually get back "That should take you two weeks." because management doesn't understand what they are asking for. I should work on my persuasive skills nonetheless.
Our process can take up to 1-2 months before people have full systems access and everything bedded down. I've seen some new hires have literally zero access for up to the first three weeks.
Someone is given a house building estimate of 6-8 months.
They they proceed to have business cards printed up, and start ordering materials to be shipped to their house for their new home business, and they slated everything for month 5. And they've already invited their family to come stay with them on month 6 day 2 to stay in the guest bedroom in the basement. ("Yes, I told you I needed a basement last week! Someone on your team was in the room and they didn't say no!").
The house building analogy is pretty far off in many many respects.
There are codes and inspections you have to comply with. You want to change X? That will mean new inspections and new codes to follow. There are essentially no codes to follow in software (I wish there were).
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.
Is there any value in you learning how to effectively work in a place where things take weeks instead of days? If not, that's okay. Though do appreciate that as that 50 person company scales, it too will need to take a longer time to align all the moving pieces.
Moving slow isn't inherently bad, it just might not be.. your thing.
That's all well and good until you have to explain that the reason building something they think should take a week will take 6 months because you have to fix tech debt, or avoid adding new tech debt.
that's a whole quarter + a month where you didn't have a body and stuff didn't get done. maybe they'd be slow at first and a burden until they're up to speed, but that means you start that process sooner.
they either needed the exact, perfect candidate, or else they wasted a lot of time
And it's an open question whether or not that attitude is better. A day or two of office admin time every 3-6 months is quite possibly more cost effective than hiring one of us for weeks/months/years to create a new system...
I wouldn't expect them to be as productive, or anywhere close to it. But IME a 3 month ramp up time is usually a sign of too much complexity for individuals to deal with.
Usually from technical debt or too broad an area of responsibility.
Over the entire 10 years it's always felt like we have been too slow to hire and needed a person in a role 3-6 months earlier.
We were a team of 5 when we hired our first full-time customer service agent. Until that hire, we would each take a day of customer support which eventually meant that our iOS engineer was answering user emails for ~6 hours a week.
Ramp-up time exists as well. Depends on the area, but if you need 6 months to really get a contractor up to speed with what you do, you can't afford to risk changing just for some marginal benefit in speed.
I spent the last 6 months being "one week away" from finally receiving the requirements for what essentially boiled down to a multi page form wizard. Maybe 30 meetings total.
They ended up just saying "go get started and we will get you requirements later" to which I said "no thanks" in so many words.
I've happily been relocated to another team. I'm excited to hear how many months /years it ends up taking them to hash out what could probably be knocked out in a single we'll organized sit down.
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