Hacker News Reader

> "Look, beyond a certain size, almost nothing you can do will save or destroy a company. At that point, people mostly go to work to play politics. Occasionally, as a side effect of the political maneuvering, work sometimes gets done."

From working at a big company, this is accurate.

> But at a 50 person company, or even a 500 person company, it's possible for single person to make a huge difference.

That's true, and you still might be stuck fighting politics to do it.

> That's true, and you still might be stuck fighting politics to do it.

Yeah, politics are kind of built into the human condition. You can't avoid them entirely, and even if you could, I'm not sure it would actually be a good thing. You need to able to convince people, to recognize them and boost them up when they're doing good work, and to get groups onto the same page. And all of this involves "politics" to some extent.

But a company's politics might be relatively healthy, or completely poisonous. Or anything in between. The best organizations are the ones where the overall goal is important, and where ethics are important, and where the politics are mostly positive-to-neutral.

Finally, if you want to save the day, you have to convince someone to take a risk on your plan, and your ability to implement it. After a couple of successes, this can become easier the next time. But there's politics involved in that, too.

I agree with what you're saying. However, I disagree on one bit:

But there, most of the people will the ability to "save the day" will usually be in upper management. The big tech companies may be an exception this: Google has their two "level 11s", and Microsoft had the massively talented team that they used to catch up to Netscape Navigator in the 90s.

The tech companies are not exceptions. You don't become a "level 11" at Google without playing political hardball. In a big company, the CEOs won't even know who you are, certainly not enough to invest in your career or give you opportunities (such as taking on Netscape in the '90s), unless you're willing to go lawful evil and collect some scalps.

"Look, beyond a certain size, almost nothing you can do will save or destroy a company."

I wanted to reflexively say no, but then I remembered Equifax breach. Now that I think about it, I mostly worked for regional entities, but never really big ones.