> Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either above humanity, or below it; he is the ‘Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,’ whom Homera denounces — the outcast who is a lover of war; he may be compared to a bird which flies alone.

Sure, Aristotle wasn't talking about corporations, but as the author says "you can refuse to participate, but that doesn’t make it go away," you shouldn't be a bird which flies alone.

Should be titled Stop Avoiding Workplace Politics?

It’s not a discussion of the toxic political environment we live in today.

> Now I think the opposite: politics isn’t the problem; bad politics is. And pretending politics doesn’t exist? That’s how bad politics wins.

Feels like that's how extremism wins? If no one wants to confront other's political ideas, out of fear irrational responses,

At least in the United States, Americans are more unified on issues than the current executive branch, or (at the very least) the largest main stream media outlet would have you believe. It'd be great if people worked at the center, dealing with outcomes. There's far too much talking past each other, as people stand on their mountain of comfortable points, far too many who ignore evidence as soon as it does not conform to their world view.

Everything has a sales component, good engineering doesn't automatically sell itself. In that respect, I agree some of what's called politics here is always necessary.

On the other hand, I've worked at places where the only way to get ahead is to be a smarmy political operator and do no real work (I find this common when there is no exposure to a real market so no objective standard of what is the right direction to take). It's better to just leave such organizations.

Politics is any question of the form "what should we do?"

If you don't want to be involved in answering questions like that, then by all means avoid politics.

> Stop pretending you’re above politics. You’re not. Nobody is. The only question is whether you’ll get good at it or keep losing to people who already are.

False. You do not lose if you do not play. You can offer your expertise/opinions and point out places where things could be improved, but at the end of the day, just treat work as someone paying for your time. If you've advised them on how to best make use of that time, and they want to do something else, well it's their money.

I think the problem here is the implication of the term "politics". We've been conditioned (at least in the US) to think of politics as a tribalistic "us vs. them" activity where interactions have winners and losers.

The classic picture of "office politics" is about either damaging reputations with gossip or getting special treatment because of who you know instead of what you know.

But this depiction strikes me as less about that dirty version of politics and more about simply accepting that social grease is important in an organization. Teamwork is important. Crafting the message to the recipient is important. Inclusiveness and a shared sense of ownership is important. Culture is important.

I detest and refuse to engage in tribalism - workplace or otherwise. But I 100% believe in the stuff from the previous paragraph.

"Think about the last time a terrible technical decision got pushed through at your company. Maybe it was adopting some overcomplicated architecture, or choosing a vendor that everyone knew was wrong, or killing a project that was actually working. I bet if you dig into what happened, you’ll find it wasn’t because the decision-makers were stupid. It’s because the people with the right information weren’t in the room."

Well, it's a decent article, but that paragraph does not match my experience. In my experience, it's typically because there's a non-technical reason why the technical decision was done badly:

1) devs, or their supervisors, or both want Hot New Thing on their resumes

2) in order to get Good New Thing purchased, the Old Bad Thing must be shown to be unworkable, so saving Old Bad Thing with a clever solution is undesirable

3) org needs a system using New Buzzword, to show to VC's or others, and this is the opportunity to use New Buzzword, whether it makes sense here or not

None of these are reasons that I like, but they are also reasons that are very convincing to most people, especially high-ranking decision makers.

I don't mean to suggest that the articles points like "Building relationships before you need them", etc. aren't a good idea. Just don't expect it to have a very high success rate in winning debates about "terrible technical decisions".

While I agree that avoiding/ignoring politics isn't helpful to anyone, it still doesn't have a place at work. My view is, people are going to disagree on politics, and therefore it just gets into a debate, or worse, an agrument at the office or in chat and makes the whole situation more ugly than the manager and/or employer wants to have to deal with.

This, this, this, but with a few caveats I’ve learned for myself (both government politics and corporate politics):

* Politics in a derogatory sense is simply bad governance. It’s bad ideas leading to bad decisions, often supported by bad data or bad justifications. In government, that “bad” might be a shade of “-ism” (corporatism, fascism, authoritarianism, racism, sexism, etc), while in corporate realms it’s often either straight dicta from the executive team or manipulative malfeasance from bad actors further down the chain

* Good politics and good governance are indistinguishable from one another, by and large.

* If consensus is reached by those acting in the best interests of the organization in the long haul, everyone involved should feel fairly invigorated afterwards. That rush is what gets folks into politics more broadly, and is how movements grow

* Cooperation, historically, breeds more success than mere competition. Bad actors wielding politics as a cudgel generally try to deter others from participating because they desire competition as a means of preventing others from achieving success.

* Politics isn’t necessarily deceitful, as the OP gets into. It’s about building relationships and understanding goals, then acting collaboratively to achieve them.

* “Politics-free zones” only serve to enable the bad actors in a space, who use that label to advance their (often indefensible) ideals and clamp down on dissent.

A lot of us in tech need to do better with politics if we want technology to change the world for the better, instead of merely serve the whims of billionaire griftos or regimes hostile to human rights.

> 5. Being visible. If you do great work but nobody knows about it, did it really happen? Share your wins, present at all-hands, write those design docs that everyone will reference later.

And don't forget that when managers or seniors are involved, there's magic alchemy that comes from spreading the credit around. Suppose Bob works under Alice and Bob, mostly solely, accomplishes something significant. If Alice presents and takes credit for it, Alice might receive 1 credit point. If she presents it as Bob's work and never mentions herself, Bob will get the 1 credit point. But Alice will pick up some credit just for presenting (let's guess 0.5 unit), Bob will get the 1 point, and because Alice now manages Bob, whose stature just went up, she'll get an additional (let's guess) 0.25 point. So you've got 1.75 units of credit instead! Never be shy to give credit to others. You will benefit too!

(This is also one of the 11 Laws of Showrunning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27867023 among other links )

This is not a great take. Politics shows up as a failure to construct an aligned organization. There will always be some politics, but it should not be the most significant thing going on at a company. In a well designed org, it tends towards zero.

In a positive sum environment, with incentives aligned with the shareholders, everyone is trying to make the business more profitable, and the "more" that everyone wants comes from the market. You have to contend with reality on reality's terms to get more.

In a zero-sum environment (which is most large corporations) nothing anyone does will meaningfully move the needle on profitability. The business has been built, and now it is coasting. How to divide up the predictable profits is decided by politics, the "more" comes from someone else within the organization getting less.

The best advice is to know which environment you are in. The "right" move is entirely context dependent. If you are in a zero-sum environment, you need to play politics, that's the game. If you are in a positive-sum environment, politics will be the noise, you can get more by building more.

Unfortunately most corporate politics is dominated by those who do it professionally

This is an excellent read and the title definitely made me assume the author wasn't talking about "office politics".

What's more important than "politics" is your ability to communicate in terms that people making decisions will understand. I didn't get this nuance early in my career. I was always focused on shipping, oblivious to costs: Time Cost, Opportunity Cost, etc.

Learning to make technical decisions based on Return on Investment is the real key to bridging this communications divide.

Weighted Shorted Job First (WSJF) is an approach that will bring your team and organization into thinking that way. It works wonders for getting people on the same page and it's just an ROI formula.

WSJF = Cost of Delay / Job Size

Job Size is a proxy for cost, because it's a proxy for time...which costs money.

Cost of Delay is a fancy way of estimating how valuable something is. Technically it's "User Business Value + Time Criticality + Opportunity Enablement & Risk Reduction" but it really boils down to Value + Time Criticality. Time Criticality meaning real deadlines where the value will go away if we don't hit it by the deadline. Think conference dates or contractual obligations, not sprint commitments (wanting something sooner doesn't make it time critical).

The more prepared you are, the better the case you can make for this number while those who are unprepared will simply have to guess without anything to substantiate it.

I got deep into this philosophy after watching an exec waste resources for over a year and a half on a project that nobody wanted. When we started scrutinizing decisions with WSJF and nothing he wanted to ranked highly enough based on the math, the entire organization got better. It does wonders to eliminate the squeaky wheel problem too.

When Jeff Hodges gave a presentation of his "Notes on Distributed Systems for Youngbloods"[1] at Lookout Mobile Security back in like 2014 or 2015, he did this really interesting aside at the end that changed my perception of my job, and it was basically this. You don't get to avoid "politics" in software, because building is collaborative, and all collaboration is political. You'll only hurt yourself by avoiding leveling up in soft skills.

No matter how correct or elegant your code is or how good your idea is, if you haven't built the relationships or put consideration into the broader social dynamic, you're much less likely to succeed.

[1] https://www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distrib...

All life is politics, and workspaces are not politics exempt. The world we live in understandably makes many cynics. Yes, still we want no kings, and more politics in and out of our workspaces.

On some level this is just a technicality. When people talk about politics they almost always talk about bad politics because good politics doesn’t feel like politics. It just feels like things are working correctly.

There is a saying "People are politics. How can you avoid people?".

The author presents two options: think you’re above politics, or practice it. I admit that, when I was younger, I did believe the first for a while, but what it progressed to was an option C: accept that politics, in some form, is necessary and affects me, then choose to spend as much of my life as possible on other things. If politics is necessary then boy is farming necessary, yet I’m not a farmer. Medicine is necessary, yet I’m not a doctor; defense is necessary, yet I’m not a soldier. These jobs are entrusted to others. We live in a highly specialized society, with which comes the gift of being free to choose beautiful things to feed our limited life energy to, and the curse of being ineffectual in any area we sacrifice little for. Because we’ll be consistently outperformed by those who give more to that area, and less to every other endeavor and principle.

Sometimes, in both workplaces and countries, we enter a state in which we’re forced to feed more of ourselves to the beast. The state’s name is desperation. It’s a tragic state, like reversion to a society in which we spend all our time finding food. People in such a state can’t create science or art.

I disagree with the OP.

An engineer avoids "politics" - as a vital protection mechanism against getting himself fired.

It's as if the blog post and people who agree with it held positions, that relied on scheming, and "alighnment" to survive.

I think many good points are made, Ive always felt that for the same reasons I stayed out of "office politics" I would also struggle to hire my own team which could handle working together for the greater good of the company. THe only solution I thought of was some sort of "fair" share dispensation.

Corporate politics is fine, just leave your national/international politics bullshit at home.