2. Highly standardized is exactly what leads to politics. Everyone's circumstances are different but somehow you need to fit everything to the same ill-fitted mold, so everyone is trying to exploit the game. The standardized interview is also the worse thing about Google/Facebook leading to dumbing things down, lack of purpose, and bad targeting of specialized skills. At least Google is backtracking from it.
3. A small company has vision and enables a few people to have genuine impact, this is what leads to doing something different and innovating. Those few people in power are stubborn, they need to. You don't innovate through design by committee. If you don't like the vision you shouldn't have joined that company.
> At least Google is backtracking from it.
Interesting, I didn't know that. How do they hire people nowadays?
1. First, there are plenty of roles in these companies. You could be working in a very small specialized team on open source software that is used beyond the company. It doesn't matter if the company is past its prime or not, and you're not more or less a cog that if you work for a startup.
2. I can only speak for my experience, but my compensation isn't based on politics at all. It's purely based on my contributions. Compensation is just like the interview process, highly standardized, no room for politics.
3. A lot of human-sized companies don't produce anything meaningful, with more politics, and you won't have any room for impact because you're blocked by a few stubborn people in power.
Again, just my experience but I found that in my FAANG, there's a critical mass of people with good common sense and less bullshit in general. In the couple of smaller companies where I worked, it wasn't the case. There were good engineers, but also enough annoying people with too much influence that make my day-to-day job less enjoyable.