from Gergely Orosz | by Gergely Orosz

Have you ever wanted to really work on a well-known product/team at a specific tech company? Have you noticed how some people spend 5-10-15+ years at the same companies? The two are connected. Let me tell you why & why internal transfers become so advantageous at many places.

Most tech companies have a liberal internal transfer policy: if someone wants to move - unless they have perf issues - they can. A few - like Facebook - even actively encourage moving. At these places, internal transfers will almost always have priority over external hiring.

When a new team is created, or an internal team is growing, the positions are advertised both internally and externally. Except internal candidates have a lot more information: they can directly ping team members and managers. It's what happened when my team was growing at Uber.

As a manager, which hire would you rather take on? Someone coming from outside, who needs to onboard for months? Or someone with years of context at the company, and a track record? When starting a team, you want to seed it with internal transfers, if possible.

There are certain teams that are always "sought after", internally as well. Platform teams are often popular (as it's both an interesting challenge, and an opportunity to grow beyond the senior level). Well-known products from the outside.

This is why I suggest to people, if you really want to work on specific teams at Company X... just try to get into Company X, as long as they have an internal transfer policy. Once you're in, it will be 10x easier to make that move.

This is also why you see some people spend 10-15+ years at the likes of Microsoft, Amazon, Google and many others. They did not work on one team. They almost always switched teams every 2-4 teams... often seeding some of the "next big thing" teams. They had the internal scoop!

And just a final anecdote. At Uber, I created a mobile platform team in Amsterdam - the first one within my org. I never hired for this team externally... as internally there was already huge interest and the right skillset. Externally we hired to "backfill" for these people.