I often find myself thinking of and seeking out experiences from my peers at these behemoths on how decisions are made and products get built there. On one hand, I’m scared of slowly going further away from all my learnings as an entrepreneur (a lot of which haven’t come easy!!!) but on the other I feel like not having had relevant experience in the right BU/product within a big co is limiting my field of vision. What are some things I should consider before switching?
* Things work slowly, so relax. There are many people that have a hand in every aspect of a product decision.
* At a startup you are actively changing the world. That’s done now. Put that completely out of your head. You are cog in a machine. Instead focus on your assigned product, help your teammates, and just learn to relax.
* You, the individual, are not important. The product is important, the department that delivers the product is less important, the teams that comprise the department are less important than that, and so on. Again, accept the reality and just relax.
* Do your best. Unlike at a startup, generally you will have time to get things correct. This is the difference between competence and others who struggle to get things right and always appear to be in a hurry. There is no reason to be in a hurry.
* Expect insufficient test automation, lots of regression, and plenty of repetition. Also expect everybody to be an expert that is in a hurry and things in a unique way. Just be patient, politely nod, and just relax.
* If you are good at systems automation then learn to automate away as much of your job as you can. Use the now increased free time to contribute to documentation and internal knowledge repositories. You will find that a lot of the documentation can be automated as well.
* My employer has something like 270,000 employees so it’s forgiven if you have no idea what all of those people in your cubicle farm do. You need to actively spend at least 2 days a month answering those questions.
* Just because you are at a big company does not mean you are safe. I have been in a large established super well known .com that failed. People get laid off even when big companies are healthy.
* If you don’t like being bored and are highly risk adverse you might find the big company life highly depressing. A lot of my advice here is to just relax, but I hate relaxing.
He said, they'd value "predictability over excellence".
Meaning, talk about your goals, give an estimation and arrive exactly on point. It doesn't matter if it's your personal project or projects/processes where you take the lead.
Being faster than estimated, or finding a better way and switching while your doing it will not be appreciated.
This really unlocked a lot of success and explained many glass walls i've been running into before.
I hope your experience is better. If you're going to a FAANG I imagine it will be. This place is much more buttoned up.
I think you will be mostly astounded at the lack of things you can learn from the way decisions are made inside big companies. Which is to say, they aren’t super rational organizations.
As a multiple FAANG alumni, I can tell you that decisions made are often strongly influenced by politics, individual executive “hunches,” and legacy tech concerns instead of raw cost/benefit or actual data.
The fact is, you’re going to make a lot more money doing much less work at FAANG.
However, very little of what you learn about how the organization runs will be valuable outside of the big organization itself.
* You need to be able to play the game if you're going to move up, if you want to stay in the same role don't make waves.
* Other people are playing the game. Sometimes if you're trying to make changes, even if they're going to be beneficial, you are going to run into people who have a vested interest in you not improving things. Don't let it get you down, pick your battles.
* You are way easier to replace than you think you are, don't start fights with people that can let you go. Most won't hesitate to remove you if you make their life difficult.
* Make the most of the perks and don't bust a gut, if anyone notices it'll be because you're making them look bad. Going above and beyond will earn you a pat on the head but nothing more.
* People will be doing everything they can to cover their own ass, don't let them use you for cover.
* Don't get too attached to projects, things get killed or mothballed. Years of work can just be binned without much warning. Make sure you're not defining yourself by what you're doing at work.
I've done my time at a couple of big firms and had people working with me on teams that want to be a 'craftsman' or don't really understand these workplaces, the thing I tell them to remember was "don't fight the waves, just let it wash over you". You can't win, you'll just knacker yourself out and drown.
Don't feel bad if you hate it or want to leave, it's not for everyone. Also don't feel bad if you love it, plenty of people have much better things going on in their life than work and are happy to coast along at a big firm doing what needs to be done.
* politics: yes, they exist everywhere, but tend to be amplified at larger companies. polish your political skills, and one thing that I've learned is that it's important to "show, don't tell"
* fiefdoms: there are more of them, some more welcoming than others. be prepared for those that value power above all. you can't take it personally, or you'll go into a very dark place; "be the rubber duck", that is, stay floating no matter what and let the negative wash off of you like water off a duck
* duplication of effort: there likely will be tons of duplication of effort (even parallel projects doing the exact same thing), sometimes it's easy to work with others and come together for a common solution, sometimes it just plain won't happen (see fiefdoms). no real advices here, just that you need to be aware
* technology stacks: sometimes some groups will be stuck with what seem to be very old technology stacks, or things that don't seem to make any sense. look at the group you'd be joining and who they interact with, find out about the pain points before you join so you aren't surprised. even a small change can affect a lot of people at that scale, so approach changes and modernization gingerly.
_You weren't in the room when the decisions were made and there is oil tanker momentum based on those decisions.
_You don't have a clue as to who is who. People within the organization know each other in non-obvious ways. There is an invisible informal network built of many years, organizational structures, and projects.
_You don't know which project is whose baby. Two equivalent approaches are not equivalent when one has backing and the other relies on natural selection.
None of these is bad. It's just the nature of blindly encountering an elephant. Good luck.
- there are feuds between companies or even departments in the same org
- decisions are not based on facts but on political circumstances
- the outcome of an analysis is often predetermined
- not the best idea/project/etc. win's but the one with the best connections
- decisions are made that are damaging to the company just to deny someone else in the org a success
- Relax, don't boil the ocean. (This is first advice given to me by one of the director after raising concerns over dev practices being followed)
- Learn presentation skills. Charts are important. Executives don't understand technical language but only charts.
- Stay humble but be political. Avoid heated arguments. Give logical choices to people and let them choose instead of proving them wrong. Make sure to get all discussions on mail. So if later blame game starts, you will be saved.
- In such orgs, some folk stays for decades. They don't care about product or team. Deal carefully with them. But then again you can find some real gems with decades of specialist experience. Learn from them as much as possible.
- Learn proprietary technologies. Most of time such techs are not available for individuals or very pricy.
- Get certifications. Big corps provide very expensive certifications with huge discounts. (But before working on them make sure there arn't any traps. E.g. In my org, you had to stay for atleast a year after finishing certifications or pay back)
- Understand KPI well. (e.g. In startup, you may get appraisal on working hard in weekends and shipping. But in megacorps, that won't happen. You may get some praise but not appraisal)
- If you want recognition, try to conduct department wide technical sessions. People will respect you in (those never ending) meetings.
- Don't invest your emotions in projects. Sometimes they get scrapped quarterly.
- Welcome to world of VMs. Organizations are tuned for operations not for engineering. (I miss my Linux)
- Even though your performance is good, you can get canned. Layoffs are done based on budget not on performance. Keep an eye on Gartner index. Also manager plays key role in almost all decisions. So think once before messing with him/her.
- And last but not least. Don't go in comfort zone. Always keep an eye on market & opportunities.
>...What are some things I should consider before switching?
Take a break if you can afford it. I think that will serve you better than almost any other thing you can do, work related. I've felt this way, and took a few months off, I was champing at the bit to get back to work and start making something happen. You'll think a lot clearer about what you want to do next with some time away.
After you get out of a serious relationship, you need time to heal, regroup, re-find yourself, re-learn who you are, etc before you start dating again. It's similar with jobs you put a lot into.
The biggest transition for me was the amount of cross org digging and asking and such required. So much is constantly in Flux, and internal integration points are often poorly documented or have apis based off protocols from a decade ago, or whatever else. You spend most of your time doing that, figuring out how to integrate with various old, half supported systems, getting pushback that the integration won't be supportable, etc.
This is in strong contrast with a small company where you are generally working with public, well documented tools, and everyone you work with shares the same goal.
That said, I'm happy now that I have gotten used to it. The scale of things you work on is much greater.
One thing I'll say is don't sell yourself short by taking a job at the low end of where you think you should be and telling yourself that you can work your way up. I made this mistake when I was unemployed but not desperate. Your project could be canceled or there can be blockers or reorgs or whatever else that keeps you back. So wait for the offer that you want.
In my Amazon experience:
* Some very high level project requirements would come from above (e.g. after this date, internal technology X is being deprecated, so you should have a really good reason to put out a project with X).
* Otherwise, decisions were mostly made at a low level, documented, debated with the wider team for an hour, then implemented. This was a little more structured than at the startup, but most of it was that documentation and debate happened before implementation, rather than after implementation at the startup.
* Project managers were somewhat active with the team, but a lot of the features we worked on came from the engineers watching what was used, forum requests, or customer requests through other channels (e.g. conferences).
* There was a focus on getting products out quickly, but tech debt/tests/reliability was a much bigger focus than anywhere else I've been.
* The team was fairly small, and encouraged to make heavy use of other team's internal tooling/native AWS tools for anything that didn't really need to be custom. Interactions with those teams was pretty straightforward and mostly supportive- "We're using your service to do Y, and would like to do Z too, but that doesn't seem possible without some tweaks to your API/service, is that something you can put in the backlog to investigate?"
* An individual team could be quick to change, but the organization as a whole has a lot of cultural momentum in the way things are done, and it's not clear who to talk to to make recommendations. For example, at the startup, I could go to the CEO and express concerns about the newly restrictive information security policy. At Amazon, I'm probably not going to email Jeff Bezos and suggest six-pagers be made available in advance of meetings.
* Transferring teams in Amazon is mostly extremely easy
* Conversely, Conway's law applies hard in AWS- it didn't seem straightforward to offer products or features that weren't obviously under one team's purview without forming a new team.
- Realize you are signing up to be part of a bigger machine, and there are things you will have less control over. This is both limiting and empowering.
- Both people in small and large companies can be smart, but they are typically a different flavor of smart. Learn from them accordingly.
- You should plan to have a much longer lead in terms of getting things done if it requires a dependency on a team you don't work with frequently.
- The team you work on is far more important than the company you work for.
- Be active rather than passive about finding opportunities and projects to work on. You can easily get stuck working in a role you might not be a fit for or a manager you don't click with.
For my first assignment, I had a question about an API I was supposed to use. I was told to email Bob.
me: "Do I do A or B when using the API?"
Bob: (cc's his manager my email)
Bob's manager: Is your team suppose to be using API? (my manager cc'd)
Two weeks of infighting later, still no answer to A or B, and my task is now past due.
* Things work a lot more slowly in big co's.
* There's a lot more ego involved so prepare for a lot of ass lickers(I really can't think of a better term).
* A lot of "meetings", "discussions", "planning" and so on, which often are just means to kick a can down the road.
* More time to relax.
* Nearly impossible to change the status quo, not impossible but a very slow and painful process.
* Often more freedom to experiment with technologies and proprietary solutions if you find a way to justify them(which is often not a difficult task).
* Plenty of ways to squeeze out training, seminars, certifications and whatnot, just make sure you read the tiny font at the bottom.
Use your capital constrained mindset productively, but be attuned to when to shut it off. Being able to do a lot with a little can be a positive trait inside a larger company (e.g., early days on an unproven project), but you need to recognize when capital should be applied so you don’t risk unknowingly playing small ball.
There is something to be said for another commenter’s suggestion to “relax” a little bit. You’ll need to, because larger companies move more slowly. Be willing to push, but recognize that there are limits to what a large org can do in a short amount of time. That’s just reality.
Try your best to adopt a longer term mindset. In a smaller company you are often focused on what’s happening right now - larger companies have more space and more runway to think over longer arcs of time. What are the implications of what you are doing now a year, or even three years out?
Although the book can be considered bleak, the point is not to train you to suspect your employer, but rather point out various possibilities of politics and power play that may be going on under the surface that are not so obvious from the get go. I.e. it's a survival manual of sorts to a new and sometimes semi-hostile environment.
Even in big companies you will be constrained by budgets, and possibly even more than you're used to. The big companies have money to try many different things, but normally products start small, and can be killed if they're not going to be profitable enough. Especially if you're ina leadership position, you're going to have to convince people to fund your products.
The other big thing to consider is politics. Don't get me wrong, politics are everywhere, even in startups, but there's a difference. You're going to have arguments with people that you can't go have a beer with after work, and you have to consider how that will affect your relationship after the argument.
At a big company you're typically working on something much more mature, making lots of money, with many users who rely on it. You still need to make it better, but it's now much more important not to break what's already working. Even if your project is a new one, you still have the company's reputation to protect so you don't hurt existing products. Different companies handle this different ways (I lean towards investing in efficient end-to-end testing and experimentation) but all the options here trade velocity for reliability.
You better brush up on your social engineering, learn when to smile and when not to, and watch your back. Rationality and intelligence will not get you far on their own, because the game isn't about who's the smartest or who has the best ideas, it's about leverage, prejudices, cliques, "prestige", and ultimately money.
Remember you're there to play with some toys, occasionally commit code, and get that sweet money.
Culture. The fact that it doesn't matter what the company says their culture is and that their culture is defined by the behaviors that they do and don't allow in the workplace. Culture can vary from team to team and department to department.
Deadweight. The organization is going to be full of dead weight.
Get ready to feel under-appreciated and under-valued.
There will be office politics, somebody will always either be too hot or too cold in the office, connections will be much more important than talent... yeah, especially that last one. If you want to get anything done in a big company and have any sort of leverage anywhere, connections, connections, connections.
You might get a meek yearly review just because someone in your echelon has cozied up to somebody in a higher echelon and wants a raise.
There might be a company-wide call for product-ideas with the promise of leading your own team should your idea be selected. To be fair, that does happen but the best ideas will be rejected by the committee and then resubmitted as their own.
Whichever company you pick, read the glassdoor reviews and look for stories on reddit and HN. I don't have any links handy but over the years there have been quite a few on reddit about the company structure in GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft). These pictures [1] remind me most of those.
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804 [1]: https://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2011/7/5/organizational-char...
You'll find out this stuff by a sort of osmosis, there isn't really one person who knows stuff, you just sort of bump into the useful person eventually.
Keep track of names and acronyms, there will be lots of both.
* In big corp there are a bunch of people who are actively just making a living and career out of shit talking and being in the right spot of the machinery doing very little actual work.
* There can be lots of redundant work and other inefficient waste. For example double/triple bug/task tracking systems, several different repositories with half assed mirrors etc.
* There are "gate keepers" who have been at the BigCorp for a hundred years and have managed to put themselves in a position where they get to act as the gate keeper of access to some resource. Examples are some "enterprise" level CVS tools like ClearCase where there's some "merge/release manager" who gets to do branches and merges and releases etc. These people will vehemently resist any change to make these processes more efficient. (see the point about efficiency)
* Some people exist in the organization just to make a career using whatever means possible including bullying, politics, (passive) aggression towards others (trying to sabotage their work, take credit for it), ass kissing, nepotism etc.
For me, the biggest difference is that processes in a big co are designed for any single individual to be replaceable. As a consequence, everything is bigger than you and slower to change even if for the best. This is exactly what you're trying to achieve in a successful start-up as it starts with everyone being irreplaceable (to some extent) where you can make a fundamental difference in the future of the company.
Being part of a successful company sounds exciting and you can learn valuable information to apply in other settings but I found that in start-ups you have a lot more room to learn than in a big co. This is because instability in a start-up is very visible and directly accessible (you'll run out of money in X months) so you must timebox everything. However, in a big co instability is more implicit and you can't fail as much. Also unless you can get a fairly high level position at a big co, you won't be able to get "very" relevant experience into building/working the right product because a lot of strategy is not discussed bottom-up in those companies.
This is my own advice to myself, after changing industry four years ago I'm moving to a new company but same industry next month. These are some of my biggest take aways after going in to recover from a everyone got hit by the metaphorical bus scenario with not hand over and little support. I'm probably a bit on the negative side but I think the advice holds up either way.
Having a quirk or two is fine, it shows confidence. But you cannot be out of step in too many things, even if it compromises your effectiveness.
If they don't expect much, focus elsewhere. Prepare for disappointments, but if you can keep asking and looking, there'll be no lack of opportunity later.
There may be different periods in your worklife, where you focus on different aspects of work. Don't be disappointed in yourself, but recognize different skills and tools are needed to fill the toolbox. What is important to the corporation is getting the jobs done, not fill your CV. Nobody will care if you do it right or not, but doing it wrong will hinder further development. So getting stuck in quagmire or bubble, is poor job-protection, as at some point in time things will be changed from under your feet.
Any big org will have its system for personal development and advancement. These vary wildly in how well they work and how fair they are. You will have a line manager who's job is in theory to help you develop. They also vary wildly in how helpful they are (middle managers who benefit by keeping good people on their team and so preventing them getting promotions is a classic bad big company problem).
Understand the development system. Understand the metrics and make sure that you do work to check the boxes. Just doing your job well probably won't work on its own to get pay rises and promotions. Every metrics system has its weaknesses - game them to the degree that you consider ethical.
-- There's lots of machinery to support you in various ways. You don't need to do it all yourself. This makes it possible to do things at a scale it's often hard to do at a small company.
-- It depends on the role of course, but harnessing that machinery, coordinating, and getting the word out about anything across the company takes a lot of effort. People are specialized and it's hard to get them to pay attention to things that are not of immediate importance to their job.
In a smaller environment, if you have an email that slipped past you, typically someone will just ping you or bother you in person to ask you something, but in a megacorp that's simply not going to fly.
We can actually abstract that a bit; if you're not used to having a lot of imposed structure and restrictions, moving to a megacorp is going to be initially difficult for you. I've been at mine for about two years, and I only recently feel like I've found a workable pattern.
Politics are the most important thing with respect to large groups of people. Your ideas will matter less than who you are and the clout you carry. Always be paying attention to who is asking for things and why they might be asking those things. At bigger companies, people's personal agendas may trump company agendas, and you may have to pick and choose which projects are worth taking (after understanding the who and the why).
Startup - Enterprise does not mean a paradigm shift in everything. Yes, there are some aspects that would change. And then there will be a lot of scope for applying your self-made learning and leanings.
Most big corps have done really smart people, don't be afraid to actively seek to learn from them.
Everybody CCing the world to cover their asses
Being switched from a project to another because of reorganisation
Your project being cancelled because “not a priority”
You don't need to push too hard to succeed. Not rocking the boat (too much) is more important than anything else. You can push teams to greater efficiencies, products to better outcomes, etc. but do this in a slow and methodical way. You won't get any benefit from being frustrated and neither will those around you.
In the end I looked for the same things you would at a startup: growth, revenue, and technical fit, and found a good opportunity within a huge multinational. I've since filed a couple of (provisional) patents, and we're growing like crazy, so our exec got promoted.
We still have a lot of issues like others describe here with Conway's law, inter-group coordination, and so on, but we have clear goals and metrics.
In contrast, I had a previous job at Microsoft that completely stagnated, even as the rest of the company was booming. It really depends on the opportunity.
On the other hand, you will get a ton of exposure learning from others and knowing more people. That’s always there for sure at large organizations. Above all, a sense of being a part of a cult.
On the other hand you will also have to pay taxes at a big co. Big co got that way in many cases because they have an integrated solution for customers. Integration is expensive but worth it. It takes a lot of people to be in alignment to make integration work. And that takes time; you need to be patient and look for opportunities to make a difference.
That won't necessarily change in a big corporate environment. Management can be surprisingly resistant to approving funding requests.
We had significant problems getting the purchase of android and iOS devices approved for product testing, for instance. I'm certain that the human time spent getting the purchase approved cost far more than the actual purchase.
Point being: what about SpaceX, Tesla or Stripe ?
Are they also slow ? with politics and no transparency & co ?
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
https://zwischenzugs.com/2018/10/02/why-are-enterprises-so-s...
These are very different activities, not in the activities and efforts so much but in choosing where to focus those efforts.
You might have a leg up when it comes to keeping your budget low. Upper management is always happy with that.
You may also fine that there are people with many many reasons why you can't just do things, a fear and inertia.
Good luck!
There's actually a lot that's the same. If you were hired by a large tech company, they think you can do your main thing (write code, think through product strategy, whatever) well. Most of how you do that thing doesn't change.
You're still working with people. People everywhere are more-or-less the same. Some bosses do a good job encouraging debate/disagreement, some less so, but that's true both at large companies and start-ups.
There's a lot of pressure that comes with working at a startup where a release determines whether the company will continue to have money, something you don't have to worry about as much in a large company. But life in a large company is often capital constrained in a similar way. In a large company, the set of pressures is different (keeping costs down in order to be more profitable, as opposed to being limited by what check VCs wrote), but you still have some budget you're working against, timelines, and the possibility of your team being defunded.
At a big company, you have to distinguish between where your team is in the product lifecycle. Some teams are developing new products. Working for these teams feels a lot like working at a start-up, and comes with many similar challenges. It does have some other challenges - you have pre-defined standards for what it means for something to be ready for launch, but you also have a larger network to draw from in order to get you there.
For established products at a large company, the tolerance for risk is much lower. Other commenters have said "well, you're just a cog in the machine now," but this risk tolerance indicates the opposite: your one-line code change or that feature you designed can make life better for thousands of people, or it can make life a nightmare. There's a lot of individual responsibility that comes with that.
At a large company, be prepared to spend longer thinking through your ideas and defending them to others. This comes with trade-offs: you are forced to think through your ideas, making them clearer and better along the way (good), but also may spend less time on that then writing code (bad).
At least at the large company I work for, I've found the standards are much more consistent. I spent the first 8.5 years of my career defending/recommending/arguing for the use of unit tests (of course, being pragmatic with it, when it's helpful, and all the other caveats that ought to come with that). I have not had that debate in 4 years - engineers here understand why we need unit tests (and code reviews, design reviews, coding standards, linters, automated builds...). I think this has a lot to do with the culture and one group of employees learning the lessons from a previous group, but for whatever reason it might be it does make life easier to take certain standards for granted.
At a large company, the access to experts is pretty amazing. If you don't know how to do something - how to fix an issue with your service, how to get started in new technology, conduct a particular kind of user study, etc. - there's very likely someone who does know that is an email send away. At a start-up, even a larger O(100's) people start-up, your network is more limited.
At least at the large tech company I work for, when people are ready for something new, that usually means moving within the company. This isn't usually an option at a start-up. This means that all that stuff you learned about the company's special ways of doing things maintain transferrable for longer.
I've found an entrepreneurial approach can be valuable at a larger company. At the company I work for, it's not unheard of for new ideas to go to market in the matter of months, but very often management looks for successful milestones at a rate not that different from what startup management or VCs look for: some kind of 2-3 year plan of where you want to end up, and with a milestone release within the next 6-12 months, closed betas before that, etc. All the same things apply about knowing your customer (who, in this case, might be someone else inside the company), understand the customers' needs, start with a problem and not a solution, and all that.
One of the biggest differences has been navigating the corporate structure. At a 300 person company, you probably know who to go to for any possible problem you can imagine. At a large tech company, you probably don't know who to talk to, and you might not even know who to talk to in order to find out who to talk to. Finding the right person to talk to is more of a skill in these larger settings, and it helps to understand the corporate structure, what are the different teams working on similar kinds of things as your team, and all that sort of thing.
So, that's a bunch of things, let me know if there's some other aspect of the switch you're curious about.
There will often be inertia, delays, and even silence when having to go through organizational processes. It took almost 2 weeks for me to receive my laptop at company 1, and then I sat waiting for a week for word of security clearance for a piece of software. At company 2 I started applying for internal full-time positions a month and half before my contract was not going to be renewed (more on that later). I got a single in person interview (after waiting a month for pointless phone screens) my final week. The first few weeks after I left I was getting pinged asking for phone screens on positions I had applied to earlier.
There will be key people who carry tremendous weight politically, fiscally, and operationally. Finding them and making yourself visible/useful will be tremendously beneficial. I was lucky that both people who interviewed me fit this bill. I ended up getting moved into better, more enjoyable roles as a result. The security clearance I mentioned previously was resolved within a few hours of my direct manager emailing the security team manager (who she knew) asking what the status was (I was denied and they never bothered to inform me). These people are valuable for getting you where you want to be in the company, and tend to be more visible internally which is likely to make you more visible as well if you working with/for them.
There are going to be organizational decisions that are inexplicable, and there are limitations to the power of the people I mentioned above. At company 2 the first team I was on was one of 5 that were working on a single web product. The product lead was invaluable due to his domain knowledge and product skill. When I talked to him my final week he told me he was being moved onto another team during a key phase of his current product. The final team I was on myself and another dev was ineligible for FTE because we weren't physically located in one of the 3 areas the team members were located, even though the entire team itself was remote and they had been unable to hire new developers for the past couple of months that we were there.
Sometimes the company is rigid to the point of it being painful, and you're told "That's just how we do it here". We were expected to release a fully fleshed out, bug free product by a set date with zero wiggle room. This happened despite not having anyone to onboard it to for almost a month after release, after which it was barely used because the company decided to focus their efforts elsewhere.
Make a point to have a solid grasp of what is going on in other teams and the company at large. This will help you in seeing any funding/resource changes coming that will directly impact you.
Be mindful of politics and pick your battles wisely. You may not want to do one or both, but knowing who pulls great weight and who is aligned with who should keep your role cleaner.
There are likely going to be people who don't pull their weight, and they can even be above you in rank. Often times this is well known and there are reasons why, even if it's something as silly as the company doesn't fire FTE.
Meetings. There will be more of them than are needed, longer than is needed, and where you aren't needed.
Sometimes teams/groups can have drastic culture changes from the company at large. It can be remote vs in-office, everyone on the team works daily together in a large office (ugh), communication styles (email vs chat vs phone), lunch together/alone, etc.