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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This line alone makes me believe you've never worked at small companies.
Small companies are where people who don't have better options go to coast either voluntarily, or involuntarily.
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.
