Ask HN: What public tech companies have the least internal politics?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17055155

by dieterrams • 8 years ago

47 28 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

In other words, what public tech company can engineers work at where you’re not battling for visibility and preference?

Obviously, at large organizations, things aren’t going to be uniform across all teams, and people’s experiences will be limited, but I’d like to hear what people have to say all the same.

rdlecler1• 8 years ago

I found it funny that this was posted four hours ago and not a single response. It may be difficult to get away from politics in large organizations whose efforts are focused on developing a handful of products.

kwillets• 8 years ago

Unless you're the lead dog, the view never changes.

sockgrant• 8 years ago

Yup. Decisions have to be made, people will always try to influence them. You’re either making the decisions, trying to influence the person that is, or you’re sitting out.

tripletao• 8 years ago

In other words, what public tech company can engineers work at where you’re not battling for visibility and preference?

There isn't one. Identifying and influencing the people who decide stuff--who does what work, business and technical strategy, your bonus--is always a valuable and necessary skill. A good manager can do some of that for you, but can't take it over entirely.

More practically, variation from group to group within a large company is usually bigger than variation between companies. I doubt a useful answer to your question exists.

If you want a job with less politics, then you're probably better off assessing specific opportunities than assessing massive companies on average. Like, ask "How did you choose the tools for your most recent project?" in the interview, and see what that tells you about their power structure.

dieterrams2• 8 years ago

My issue isn’t so much with having to influence people, but being in a situation where you’re always struggling against other people to do so, constantly being worried that a point you make in one channel will be repeated by someone else without attribution in another channel that’s more visible to people with more power, or worrying about someone who has more ‘juice’ with a manager talking down your work, when that manager doesn’t have the expertise to judge for themselves, etc.

I’ve had work experiences that were completely free of this sort of thing, but at small to medium-size startups. My current employer, not so much.

You’re right, of course, that I need to be assessing specific opportunities. I guess I’m just trying to see if there are any broad difference between public tech companies.

closeparen• 8 years ago

Any group of engineers is going to put up a fight if someone comes in trying to do things the "wrong" way. You want to find the tribe with the same standards and design aesthetics as your own, and that depends on what your opinions are. Tribes like this tend to run on reputation, trust, and referral. Which prior coworkers have you tended to agree with? Chances are there's a community out there of like-minded individuals, and you can tap into it by getting referred to a company staffed by then, or by referring known members to infect your own organization.

Teams can have cultures of being more or less concerned about ladder-climbing, performance reviews, management's favor, etc. It's been my experience that the level of concern is inversely proportional to enjoyment of the work itself; the best defense against office politics is the classic triad of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. But even a low-politics-emphasis team culture is not going to save you from worrying about these things if you choose to.

Melchizedek• 8 years ago

Perhaps it's a good sign if a company allows/encourages remote work. Since politics is often 'personal', a more impersonal setting would reduce the opportunities of people who like to play politics instead of working. It also makes it harder to hide incompetence, and since the politics players are often at least semi-incompetent in my experience, that would also work against them.

gadders• 8 years ago

I think that is true, but I would say some environments are more "pull others down" than "build myself up".

muzani2• 8 years ago

My experience with large organizations is that everyone thinks they're the best, unless they're far below average.

In a good company, engineers themselves probably deal with less politics than a startup, because there's a layer of management dedicated to filtering out the politics from the engineers.

You'll still have to deal with shit like several departments trying to push dependencies or accountability to another department. But the internal politics themselves can be milder.

The brand name companies (Google, Microsoft, etc) will also probably have much more politics as they attract competitive types. I'm sure these companies do a lot to filter, but things like this are very hard to filter.

telltruth• 8 years ago

Ha! It’s precisely because of layers of politicians, engineers are constantly forced to face politics. I have been involved in doing shit mindless feature because Mr Clueless X 3 levels above wanted it. I have spent 50% of my time in dumb meetings feeling with higher ups. I have spent 2 months of do nothing in offsides by these stupid clowns. Shall I go on?

amarkov• 8 years ago

Mr Clueless X didn't want the feature because he read it off an Ouija board. He wanted it because sales told him "this feature could make us millions of dollars a year!", or a customer asked him "how could you possibly sell your product without this critical feature?".

Without a Mr. Clueless X in the way, it would be presented as your fault that the company lost suchandsuch major deal by not already having the feature. That's a much harder political game to play.

muzani2• 8 years ago

I often say that the CTO's job is to shut down all the Mr Clueless. Every layer should come with their own mix of technical managers and systems analysts who are there to filter out the people above.

My own job is to basically read all the docs and just point out some documentation that tells the higher up that this is not a good idea, or this feature is not likely, or draw diagrams explaining the complexity of the feature. The programmer who is doing the work can't do this, because it will sound like an excuse. And the analyst is also there to help higher ups figure out whether the developers are just giving excuses or saying something true.

If that isn't happening then you should probably get out, as things won't get better.

jonathanyc• 8 years ago

Why does the tech company need to be public? Is this just a proxy for “big”? Or do you actually care about the company having shares, perhaps because you like getting RSUs?

dokem2• 8 years ago

Is 'proxy' new tech jargon? I've been hearing it a lot lately.

jdc• 8 years ago

akhosravian• 8 years ago

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proxy

Looks like it dates from the 15th century.

Here’s a guess for what you’re experiencing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Fre...

dekhn• 8 years ago

proxy, like "proxy variable", is a common term in stats for a visible measure that correlates with another one that you care about, but can't easily measure.

It's more common in tech circles as stats and ML have become more popular.

dieterrams2• 8 years ago

Or do you actually care about the company having shares, perhaps because you like getting RSUs?

That, and the (usually) better work/life balance compared to startups.

yayana• 8 years ago

Large private companies are not startups and have better work/life balance and better share programs/dividends. But good luck on finding one with less internal politics than large public companies..

bsvalley• 8 years ago

You want visibility? Apple. Though, you have to work your butt off from Mon to Sun and build something solid. You also have to be your manager’s dog. Follow him/her everywhere and help him/her closing bugs and building stuff.

sidcool• 8 years ago

Where there are people there will be politics. Perhaps in the distant future when AI takes over it will be better.

atmosx• 8 years ago

Hm no. As much as engineers like data-driven decisions, there are other considerations that go in choices which are very hard if not plain impossible to mathematise.

So you introduce AI in the decisional process. You just shifting the problem from one field to another, but be sure that the extend of the problem will be of the same magnitude if not bigger due to the added complexity.

shanghaiaway• 8 years ago

Google

mabynogy• 8 years ago

Probably those with a strong like Tesla but I'm not sure if they are better place to work at as en amployee.

sjg007• 8 years ago

It's always team dependent. Do your work well and make your manager happy. Eventually start your own thing.

some_account• 8 years ago

Pick small companies instead because politics will always exist in if ones. There simply is no way around it.

Ask HN: What public tech companies have the least internal politics?

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