The alternate strategy is loyalty to "the business" rather than any particular person.
When you're invested in the success of the business above all else, and you make that known, you'll carve out a position where you're valued.
Not because you went on a "carving out your importance" mission, but because your energy goes into your work, and the details and care for the long term business objectives. Also... you can then enjoy yourself more, which opens creativity which opens innovation. Sometimes this might mean disagreeing with managers or working on stuff nobody really knows you're working on right now.
> "So if you want to get something technical done in a tech company, you ought to wait for the appropriate wave"
No. That doesn't work. You have to start building it. Don't wait.
I agree with this. That's been my take throughput my pretty long career and was a recipe for success.
You still need to:
1. Be good at what you do.
2. Be good at politics/communication when that's needed.
3. Be in an organization that has good people and also cares. There are organizations where there's just a complete disconnect from the business for various reasons. Dysfunctional.
This is a good strategy, imo. I was following it for almost a year and I was having a blast working in a startup. Then a new manager came along and started to dictate how things should be done without much input from the technical team. I kept fighting for what I thought was good for the product instead of aligning with him. In the end it was just too stressful (the manager was not only an idiot but also rude). I resigned, but I wouldn't have done any other way. I simply can't be made to do dumb things from uncurious people.
It's a shame when resigning is the only way out. Before reaching that point, the usual strategies should be attempted:
Picking your battles;
Negotiate rather than fight;
Be better at analytics and research than anyone else. So you have the data to measure or predict success about a particular feature or direction.
Armed with your data, you must carefully communicate findings without shaming others.
It's a fine line between fostering a positive work environment in the face of misguided decisions, and being condescending or derisive towards other team members. There is no silver bullet, but a touch of self-deprecating humour never hurt. If you advice isn't taken, you'll have a non-snarky receipt. Any email written with an irritated tone, will look twice as bad months later.
I did create benchmarks and simulated impact following different scenarios (including the one I was advocating for). Unfortunately that was received in deaf ears. Even worse, actually; they thought I was being too pushy by adding the scenario I was proposing to the analysis. At this point I knew I had to leave.
you should do everything possible to make a career in a small company. after three decades as SWE it is my #1 (there is not even remotely close #2) advise for everyone in the early stages of their career
I am 51. I love small companies. My second best experience was working as the second technical hire by a then new to the company CTO who was hired to bring technical leadership into the company. The two non technical brothers who were founders outsourced the development to a consulting company until they found product market fit.
But I still did the same thing the article and commenters suggested. I stayed strictly aligned with what the CTO wanted and just from that, I was able to guide the entire technical architecture of the company for two years even though I had no hands on experience with AWS.
Let’s not be fooled though. My next job after that startup that had 60 people was at the second largest employer in the US - AWS working in the consulting division (AWS Professional Services).
It was an immediate 50% bump in pay. An even greater contrast is that an intern I mentored got a return offer at 22 in 2022 that was the same I made at 46 in 2020. They are now at 25 making slightly more than I’m making at a medium size third party consulting company working full time as a staff consultant.
Your principled stand is leaving a lot of money on the table.
At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work at any large company again and I have turned down a position that was going to be created for me at another large well known non technical company where a former coworker was a director and ignored overtures from GCP in their professional services department that would pay a lot more.
I also wouldn’t like the company I work at now with around 700 people if I weren’t brought in as a staff engineer where I have almost complete autonomy on how I lead my projects and the ear of the CxOs
But let’s not pretend the extra $75K to $100K+ I could be making isn’t worth playing politics. I’m just at a place in life where I can prioritize other things than money.
Also, at 51, I’ve learned a few things. Not to make your “career” at any company and to always be prepared to jump ship when the environment changes or the raises don’t keep up with the market. I’m now on my 10th job.
not everything in the career is about money, your entire post is related to compensation which is also core reason why many people in the industry endure fucked up place to make an extra few bucks. there is a much better path in the industry that isn't built around "jumping ships" and chasing every dollar there is to chase. and that path is much better for your long-term physical and mental health as well everything else that surrounds your life, especially in the years that matter, when you are young and full of life in the late 20's, 30's and 40's. having stress-free life in your 30's and 40's (coupled with normal working hours etc...) beats the hell out of having financial freedom in your 50's
I work for one reason - to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. There is no higher calling.
If I were 22 post 2010, instead of 1996, you damn well better be believe I would have been “grinding leetcode to get into a FAANG” instead of wallowing in enterprise dev making what a returning intern makes at BigTech.
I’m not bitter, by 2012 I was 38, recently remarried and wasn’t about to uproot my (step)kids. But by youngest graduated from high school in May 2020 and I had an offer from BigTech June of 2020.
I definitely encourage any younger developer to play the game.
As far as jumping ship, if my goal is to exchange labor for money, why wouldn’t I exchange the most money for my labor given my other priorities? Instead of letting a company pay me less than market value or even worse what they pay someone coming in at my level.
Besides, I had my first house built in 2002 for $175K when I was making $65K and had no student loans. Neither is true for most students graduating today.
And it’s copium thinking that people at BigTech making 50%+ more at every level work that much harder than an enterprise CRUD developer doing Java at a bank.
I’m not advocating someone works 70 hours a week at a startup getting underpaid with the promise of “equity” that will statistically be worthless. I am advocating they get paid in cash and/or RSUs and immediately sell as soon as they vest and diversify.
And next year will be my 30th year working, I’ve never experienced burn out because I exercise my agency to say “no” to being overworked knowing I could get another job worse case and continue exchanging my labor for money and stay housed and fed.
I don’t know if it’s different, but I always carve out about a day a week to work on “skunkworks” projects that will benefit my team but that nobody has asked for yet. Then, when it does get asked for, I have a rough solution ready to go.
I would swear by this when I started working in IT, but 3y later I changed job and took a gig at a big corporation. It was eye opening and jaw dropping. Everything was lightyears ahead in terms of tech, management, money, investments in people, and much more compared to the small company. It geniuinely made me mad for not doing this sooner.
Strange, I've had the opposite experience: I've mostly worked with small startups and every few job changes will try a go at a big tech company. I'm always shocked at the gap in talent between small startups and large tech companies. Far and away all of the best and most talented coworkers I've had have been at small startups.
Of course there's a lot of variance among small companies (much moreso than large ones). But the one thing that all small companies have is people who can actually get shit done not matter what it requires. The amount of "not my lane" nonsense that occupies corporate life is both exhausting and boring. I understand why this exists for practical reasons, but it's no fun.
It's SO different. It doesn't guarantee that life is good, but politics plays a much smaller role, especially at the very small sizes. If you're objectively awesome, the chances of you being sidelined for political reasons is pretty low when there are like 10 people in the whole company. It's just obvious to everyone who is delivering value and who is not.
Conversely, if you're mediocre, there's nowhere to hide.
Or maybe instead of saying there aren't politics at small companies, it's more accurate to say that there are politics, but they're simple--everyone strives to make the (hopefully benevolent) dictator, I mean founder, happy. If your founder is awesome, life is good. If your founder is not awesome, well, everyone is going to have a bad time anyway.
> but politics plays a much smaller role, especially at the very small sizes.
I thoroughly believed this after working at a small company with little politics in one of my first jobs.
But then a couple of the later small companies/startups I worked for had politics to such an insane degree that I no longer believe small companies are better or worse in general. They just have a larger variance.
The larger the company, the more the workforce trends toward the mean. When you hire 10,000 people you can't exclusively build a company of low-politics people.
With a 10-person company you technically can build that company of mostyl 1-in-100 employees who work well together. However, you could also stumble into a company where you're working with 10 people who have worked together previously and have no intention of bringing you into their inner circle. The politics at this latter type of company is truly next level hell because there's nowhere to go, unlike at a big company or FAANG where you can transfer teams or rely on your resume to get you into the application process at another company easily.
> It's just obvious to everyone who is delivering value and who is not.
In my experience at highly political small companies, this doesn't matter. The people running the political show want the upper echelon of the company to be composed of their close friends and allies. They want the people who produce to be stuck doing the grunt work.
This does not align with my experience at small tech companies at all, and I've worked an many.
But the flavor of the politics is very different. At a small company as an IC you will very likely be working directly with multiple C-levels, often providing important context between them. A senior IC will need to be reaching out pretty actively across teams to make sure things are happening and you'll quickly build an internal network of "good people who get shit done fast".
Politics can seem no existent because in some cases just getting along well with leadership can be enough to make your life very easy. But you'll see how truly political these situations are if you have the opposite situation: someone in leadership just doesn't like you. One bad relationship can ruin you in a small company.
In a large company it's not too hard to just keep your head down (at least as an IC) and largely let your manager worry about politics. For managers it can seem more political because typically the "be friends with leadership" doesn't work because the hierarchy is both broader and deeper.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I agree with all that and I think I was trying to say something similar with my last paragraph.
I’ve gotten along with _almost_ every person I’ve worked with, including some pretty challenging personalities. I’ve always done very well at my job duties and gone “above and beyond” regularly. The only times I felt that might not be nearly enough, was at the two large companies I’ve worked at. Someone several levels away from me, that I would never meet, would decide whether I got a promotion or a raise or a juicy new assignment based on a game of organizational telephone. Frankly, when I tried I did pretty well at that game, but it was the first time in my career that I was tempted to do something out of cynical self ambition or winning rewards for my team instead of just trying to do the right thing for the customer or the business.
That’s what I think of when I hear “politics” and why, by comparison, it felt to me like at a small enough scale it’s not a thing. But if politics means needing leadership to like and appreciate you, then yeah absolutely, that is true anywhere there’s even one level of hierarchy.
I do think this could be true. Your productivity is way more visible in a small company, execs actually know what you’re working on maybe from day-to-day and most definitely week-to-week. Slackers don’t last long and mediocre developers standout, now why they might be perceived as mediocre is another discussion. My first job was at a big corporation (~150,000 employees) and honestly I saw so much politics and fiefdoms and just generally low quality developers not doing much but they could sneak under the radar because they’re a small cog in the apparatus. My next company (~50-60 employees) the devs were definitely better and way more productive, but it also felt very performative/showy environment of what devs did every what and if you were perceived as not doing enough you definitely stood out. It was a very public, perhaps stressful, work environment with demos every 2 weeks.
I’ve mostly worked at small startups in my 30 year career, and been fortunate to work mostly with excellent founders and teams. Certainly that experience colors my convictions, as your experience colors yours.
Massively different. You generally have more autonomy, fewer managers, more responsibility and wear more hats. In my experience no corporate fake people pleasing or PR language or HR nonsense. Just regular people talking normally trying to get stuff done.
Wildly different. One of the biggest things at a small company is that you can wear multiple hats to solve a problem and not step on anyone's toes. Need to play PM, backend engineer and data scientist to get a product shipped fast? No problem, and you'll be seen as a person who can get things done by leadership (if you make sure to keep your work visible).
The main divide I've seen between what makes people happy in one or the other style tech company is whether they really enjoy solving problems or doing their job. If you want to check in, do only what is technically required of you and get out, then big tech corp is for you. If you are mainly interested in finding solutions to problems and you are happy to employ whatever is necessary to do so, you'll have more enjoy small companies much more.
