How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

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.

Depends on the scope. Simple things might be docstrings or sections in READMEs, bigger things issues/tickets or a page on Notion/Google Docs or whatever you use; overview there or in your head.

The crucial mindset imo is that you're trying to do something that's already useful. At the time you write these things, you're probably more familiar with the topic at hand than anyone else in the company; try to leverage that into writing a document that someone else (or yourself in the future) can save time once they actually execute what you write by getting faster to the point where you're at right now. E.g. from the article, rewriting a js package structure in vite; think through implications and potential hurdles you already have a solution for.

They're useful in almost all outcomes. If they won't be executed, at least you know why (e.g. too complicated/effortful), and if they're executed, best case you can improve the company's offerings substantially.

As someone that has influenced company politics as an independent contributor (non-manager) repeatedly, I find you have to go through a lifecycle: 1. When you first join you need to show you can actually accomplish things, likely through code contributions / launching something. 2. After you do that you start becoming part of conversations and can start influencing directly. The key here is problem identification and bringing useful independent data. Whether we like it or not managers have built in leadership authority, IC's have to establish it by above, so usually the leadership group is dominated by managers, but if you can bring useful technical data / solutions and become a "voice of the people" if you will that lets managers not have to dig in and solve every problem you will start influencing politics.

Where I see a lot of folks fall down:

1. Focus on problems that aren't attached to either important issues: tabs vs spaces isn't gonna sink the company. If you start getting triggered about a technical thing and can't explain the impact in terms of availability, cost, productivity you'll quickly get tuned out. That isn't to say the work isn't important, it's just not workable at the political level, you just gotta fix it through influence with other IC's.

2. Inability to explain how the problem is attached to important issues: Similar to above, even if it's a real problem the ability to craft a narrative so the managers and other leaders can connect it up to real value that they'll see.

3. Discomfort with taking risks: No important problem / political problem is without risks / gaps, either in terms of timeline, impact, decision paralysis (as there are truly multiple ways to skin a cat). If you need 100% certainty to kick into gear it'll be hard to influence at the top levels as it often requires taking decisions and the inherent risks involved in signing up for those outcomes.

I dunno, maybe? It's tough to compare alternate realities. I had equity in the company that paid out well, had a base over 200k, 30% EOY bonus, was leading a team of 6, fully remote work, no on-call. Certainly there are areas I'm weaker in than I would be if I worked in a FAANG-style corporation (only doing minor work with microservices, not doing much with distributed computing), but the job was quite different than what I did when I was first hired out of college.

Frankly, I felt mentally and socially challenged enough while also being compensated more than fairly. If that means I've got a junior role while also avoiding toxic large-scale organizational dysfunction then I'm down to make that trade-off every day.

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.