> 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.

> but politics plays a much smaller role

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.

> Conversely, if you're mediocre, there's nowhere to hide.

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.

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.