Ask HN: What public tech companies have the least internal politics?
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.
29 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 66.6 ms ] threadThere 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
It's more common in tech circles as stats and ML have become more popular.
That, and the (usually) better work/life balance compared to startups.
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.