Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?
75 by lopkeny12ko | 87 comments on Hacker News. 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's slowly driving me insane. The experience is best shared as a story. I'm working on migrating our apps to the parent company's VM launching and deploy platform. Should be fairly straightforward, I think. Unfortunately, the deploy tooling isn't entirely compatible with our app so I ask the team if they can implement $X feature to support our app. The first engineer I talk to doesn't even attempt to answer my question but redirects me to their manager. Ok, that's odd, I think, but whatever. Manager says sure, just fill out this feature request doc. It'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't solve the problem some other way, yada yada...ok, I guess it's good to document your work, so sure. I fill it out and submit it. No response after two days. Then I get an automated email that their skip level manager has approved the work. Huh? This is followed by an email that the team's eng manager approved the work. Why do two layers of management need to approve work on something they have no knowledge about? 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 end of Q1 in 2022 . At this point I am in absolute shock. This should take no more than a few days to implement. 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't have an answer. I tell him I'm happy to fix the issue myself, if they link me to the relevant codebase. "It shouldn't be too hard to dig in and submit a patch," 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/W on that repo. What??? 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 done here now. Is this how it's like at all large companies? What should I do?
Launch HN: FlutterFlow (YC W21) – Build Apps Visually
45 by abelsm | 9 comments on Hacker News. Hey HN! It’s Abel and Alex here to share what we’ve been working on for just over a year: FlutterFlow ( https://flutterflow.io ). It’s like WebFlow, but for Flutter. Flutter is an open source framework for building cross platform applications. FlutterFlow combines a UI builder with pre-built templates and Firebase/API integrations, generates clean Flutter code, and allows you to deploy to app stores directly from your browser. This enables extremely fast iteration, from product idea concepts and designs to working Flutter apps. As an example of what’s possible, we built an internal app for playing trivia games by using the jservice.io API and Firebase all in under 2 hours: Time lapse of building the app: https://youtu.be/Fm4jjpuKM1E Link to live version of the app: https://ift.tt/32bwsti Exported source code: https://ift.tt/33N3Eb9 Alex and I, along with a friend of ours from Google, quit our jobs in 2019 to work on a cross-platform mobile app that ultimately failed. It was a learning opportunity, and it also led us to feel the pain of the slow iteration process every time we wanted to roll out a new experience. We were able to experiment with various landing pages within hours, but building new screens and app experiences took weeks or even months. For over a year now, we’ve been tirelessly working on fixing this problem. I first fell in love with coding by pure luck as a kid in Ethiopia. My father, who at the time owned an internet cafe, decided to start taking night classes in CS in the late 90s. Ultimately he didn’t use his degree professionally, but I ended up with learning materials and a compiler, Turbo C++ 3.0. As I grew older, eventually ending up as an engineer at Google, I started to appreciate that as engineers we were often tasked with solving problems even when the solution didn’t necessarily involve writing code. Alex comes from a physics background, doing his undergrad at Stanford, and transitioned to study CS and AI there as well. In 2016 he joined the team I was on, a small ML group within Google Maps. He’ll often admit he had underestimated the amount of skill involved in building beautiful, fast and functional apps. And he certainly didn’t expect to love building with Flutter as much as he does, having been entrenched in ML for most of his career. Yet here we are. There has recently been a healthy amount of skepticism towards no-code tools, mainly due to concerns of extensibility and scalability. This is definitely the case for some apps - a good example is a tool such as FlutterFlow itself. It would be very difficult to build all of FlutterFlow recursively. We do use it internally for many of our pages, but using a visual builder to implement our code generator seems far fetched. This doesn’t imply however that there isn’t a middle ground that enables fast iteration in a visual builder, coupled with the ability to write code that seamlessly integrates with the overall experience. We’re not quite there yet, but we believe this is the right direction. Finally, we believe Flutter is going to be the catalyst that drives this movement. It’s composability, the fact that it’s super cross-platform (Android/iOS/Web/Desktop/Embedded), and the vibrant and passionate community it fosters give it a unique advantage. Whether we do it or someone else, the application builder of the future will be built on Flutter. Huge thanks to our users, the Flutter team and the Flutter community. We’d love for you to give it a try and share your thoughts. What do you think the future of application development is going to be? p.s. we were on HN when we announced our launch back in May: https://ift.tt/3u8glot We’ve made a lot of progress since then, enabling app store deployment, payments, ability to add custom code and much more: https://ift.tt/3sqPqa6