
Ask HN: What public tech companies have the least internal politics? - dieterrams
In other words, what public tech company can engineers work at where you’re not battling for visibility and preference?<p>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.
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tripletao
> 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.

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dieterrams
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.

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closeparen
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.

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muzani
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.

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telltruth
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?

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amarkov
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.

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rdlecler1
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.

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jonathanyc
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?

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

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akhosravian
[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proxy](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...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequency_illusion)

~~~
dokem
Neither of those links really address my question.

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arbie
Proxy is not tech specific. It has been used in law, economics, and other
fields for a long time.

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bsvalley
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.

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sjg007
It's always team dependent. Do your work well and make your manager happy.
Eventually start your own thing.

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

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

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atmosx
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.

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

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

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sockgrant
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.

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shanghaiaway
Google

