It’s not a discussion of the toxic political environment we live in today.
Family politics, on the other hand, involves maybe a dozen people. Usually less. We don't even call it "family politics" even though it really kind of is. Family politics is important and you can not opt out unless you don't want (this) family. Even disengagement is a form of active participation here!
Somewhere in between, there is a line. The author says (and I agree) that workplace politics is on the "really you should be caring" side.
I've seen it way too many times, from the engineering side: isolating engineers so they don't see decisions, and then blaming them to external stakeholders when something fails.
"Stop Avoiding Workplace Politics" would represent it better - it's addressing people (like me) who sometimes fancy themselves above it.
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.
The OP is about office politics.
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.
If you don't want to be involved in answering questions like that, then by all means avoid politics.
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.
you can have an attitude towards spending the short hours you have on this earth attempting to produce quality work that others appreciate and make their lives easier in some way, as opposed to writing those hours off as sold to someone else
Back in the day, Chrome was about a sandboxed subprocess architecture that made for a more stable browser. It was also about breaking the back of the Microsoft monopoly and advocating for why people should bother to care (remember the comic strip Google commissioned?). Nowadays, if it weren't about politics at all, Chrome would still be the best choice because it's still technically very good.
But there's more to the problem than simple technical competenece.
https://www.manager-tools.com/forums/deceit-and-murdering-un...
Amazon’s LP is “Disagree and Commit”
Oh well, I'll just endure it until the job market relaxes a little.
... but at some point in a corporate setting, the job becomes about people, not just technology, because all businesses end up being about people. Deciding not to address that sends a very heavy signal to anyone with authority to put a person in a position of high authority in a company that they don't want that authority. You can't just-write-really-good-code your way towards being CTO or senior VP of anything; eventually, you'll meet the challenge of "Someone else has another idea to do it, and maybe it's worse than yours or maybe it's equivalently good but optimizes along other axes than yours, and if your answer to them asserting we should all use their solution is 'I don't do politics' then the company will use the solution that was advocated for and better, worse, or indifferent, yours will be interpreted as under-supported and routed around."
> well it's their money.
And, indeed, for those of us who don't do politics, it always will be their money and not ours.
If you are just pulling well defined tickets off the board, you are easily replaced, outsourced and it’s hard to stand out when looking for another job.
Then you shout “use your network”! That required being known, being liked and being remembered - politics.
In theory sure, but there are plenty of those in practice.
Since we're in HN: plenty of those who are YC startups too.
And due to politics, there is less and less space for engineers to interact with other teams and we need to put up a fight in order to participate on decisions.
I had criticism for Agile as much as anyone but the post-agile world is horrible.
Take this one for instance that’s on the front page.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/liva-ai/jobs/6xM8JYU-f...
It looks like the standard two non technical founders looking to underpay a “founding engineer”.
And they want you to be comfortable working “Be comfortable working 12 hours a day 6 days a week”
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.
The thing I call "politics" that engineers like to avoid is making technical decisions based on personal relationships, making who does the work more important than what is being done and how. As a low-level employee, you might have to deal with that to an extent, and thus you should develop the soft skills to navigate that environment. As a higher-level engineer, you should definitely try to eliminate it from any part of the organization that you have influence over. My worry with articles like this is that it spreads the mentality of "it's fine, you can make this work!" and then we're all worse off because we accept the status quo rather than improving the culture.
To be clear, you can't completely eliminate politics from an engineering organization, since people will always take some mental shortcuts, but you absolutely can reduce it, and things will be much better if you do. Not only will your group make better decisions, but it will also be a more pleasant working environment for everyone.
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".
1. Recognizing early enough that this Hot New Thing incentive is here and figuring out how your Good New Thing can live with the Hot New Thing
2. Helping show the Old Bad Thing is unworkable for your Good New Thing
3. Understanding that the org cares about New Buzzword and framing your work under those pretenses.
If the hierarchy is saying "it's time for GenAI", you have the option to participate in a way that raises your profile and positively influences the company (involving politics), if you hate GenAI so much you can leave, or you can stay silently and opt out of the process. These are all choices. Personally I'm fine with my VCs making strategic decisions since they trust me to make technical decisions. So we can do GenAI, we'll just do it in a way that works and is sustainable for the codebase.
You should realize that as a technical person your domain is not business strategy. Similarly I'd be shocked if any VC ever came in and told me "to use PostgreSQL" or some other nonsense. If you want to be the person deciding what we build, go into Product.
Given that, I'm not sure what your message is in response to. I will say that 'learn to parcipate in the hierarchy' and 'everything is a choice, just quit!' are hardly solutions at all, and read more as truisms.
I'll add that I'm not sure what VCs have to do with anything here, though as someone who formally took VC funding, I wouldn't want them making technical or strategic decisions on my behalf, and I suspect the majority of founders (and others on my cap table) would agree.
Why is this? Because the number and weight of the business folk almost always outnumber the technical. You can be the best fucking political engineering wrangler in the world; building relationships, taking people along for the ride, helping others gain understanding and those projects still fail.
So it's always business folks' fault, and never the nerds' fault? My experience has been different (full disclosure - professional nerd for 30 years)
For the stuff that is genuinely pushing the technical envelope, it's possible for the nerds to make the difference. In those cases you do see the projects fail for technical reasons like "the code couldn't scale to the required number of users" or "the technical functionality never worked reliably", and those kind of failures are the nerds' fault. But that's the minority of failures IME.
There’s a million reasons why projects fail, but astute engineering mangers who are able to understand what the business really needs are invaluable.
I've recently been promoted to be a VP (so, an executive) at a large corporation of ~50,000 people. Of the top ~250 people, so the top 0.5% of the hierarchy [who get invited to the annual leadership offsite], I estimate there are maybe 2-3 technical people like me. Also, within the executive hieararchy, these 2-3 are at the lowest level, this is not even where the big decisions get made, we're just put in charge of executing the decisions made by MBAs and Finance people.
I agree with this concept and what's worse is when a project is technically sound but still fails, or even when a complete high-performance accomplishment fails to be deployed.
But I'll bend the terminology of "always" and "business" because it applies even wider than that.
If you've ever worked for a 19th century company that is an actual bureau by definition, and has had literally over a century to develop from those roots into a much more resilient bureaucracy than could be accomplished in less time, you know what I mean.
What if it's not always a business reason for failure but a bureaucratic component that rises above a tolerable level?
i.e. a non-business reason for "businessmen" to fail.
In a pure bureaucracy that exists solely to maintain standards of some kind, the focus can not be on making money, or the standards could be compromised.
Others will fall by the wayside and only the most successful bureaucrats will prevail in their efforts. Handsomely rewarded sometimes through fees and taxes paid by the real money-makers whom the bureau has evolved to serve.
Yes, rewarded for their efforts, none of which are business-like at all and without any internal focus on making money whatsoever.
These organizations can be some of the most stable and long-evolved of all, plus set the most consistent example of political hierarchy that people in all kinds of places can tend to emulate when they don't have any better ideas.
So when bureaucracy creeps into a business where it has not yet made an incursion, it has to do so under the radar because it's the opposite of trying to make money.
People get good at this and move up in the hierarchy, and eventually there's nobody who's even good enough at actually trying to make money any more. It's a full-time effort just building & maintaining the bureaucracy.
You end up with people that "look" like businessmen, act the way they think businessmen should act, golf like businessmen, etc.
But haven't got a clue how to make a dollar from a functional technical success that's a complete no-brainer :\
I've lost count of how many times something was proposed and rejected by everyone in the chain except the C-suite. Then the C-suite overrode the process decisions basically because they played golf with someone outside the company.
I was once even part of a vendor assessment that was rejected and it turned out that the CEO had already given the green light and signed paperwork weeks before so we all were just wasting our time on something that had been decided unilaterally.
It's like two people discussing how to handle difficult conversations in a romantic relationship, and a third guy comes in and says "this conversation is irrelevant because every time I date someone they cheat on me". I'm sorry you're dealing with that problem, but it is not really related to the topic at hand.
A solid understanding of behavioral psychology may make it obvious, but like you mention, one could also just open a newspaper.
Pretending that identifying stakeholders' needs, communicating the solutions, and delivering them are the keys to succeeding in corporate politics is a joke. It's our parent's telling us that we need to be good for Santa Claus. Human politics is an enormously deep subject, and a newbie will get trampled every single time. If you are sitting at a poker table and don't know who the sucker is within five minutes, congratulations, you are that sucker.
The majority of marriages end in divorce. This doesn't mean that I should treat all prospective partners as someone I will eventually divorce. That is not healthy for me, the people I interact with, or my future.
But, it does mean that I forced [1] my 2nd wife to sign a pre-nuptual agreement, and I go around recommending others to do so as well.
[1] she initially refused to sign it, I told her the wedding's off if she doesn't, so she did; she's still unhappy about this and hates me for a day whenever she's reminded of it; this was 5 years ago, we're still married and not divorcing currently; while I know it doesn't sound romantic, it was the right thing to do because people and life circumstances change _a lot_; I hope we will stay together forever and get buried next to each other, but I had the same hope with my 1st wife and then she cheated on me when my then-startup was failing, so now, much wiser, I can see a 1000 ways for such hopes to fall apart
This unhappiness that your wife has will not go away and you will deal with situation at some point. These hard conversations have a way of finding you.
I won't tell you to tear up the pre-nup, but I highly recommend coming up with a compromise (over time) that meets both of your needs.
My man, all of us would. I talk to my wife often about this. We are just built differently and that is what makes the opposite sex so attractive tbh. That irrationality comes out in different positive ways I'm sure (or you wouldn't have married), you can't just turn it on and off (unfortunately)
Did you tell here beforehand (earlier in relationship) you wanted a prenup, or only after proposal?
You should be aware that it's a possibility and act accordingly. Pretending divorce is impossible is what's unhealthy; preparing for the possibility will make for a healthier marriage and a better future, whether you ultimately divorce or not.
This is pedantic, but if I understand correctly, this is not true anymore. Moreover, this number is inflated by a set of people getting divorced multiple times.
I don't think that's actually true. Identifying the stakeholders' needs is absolutely something that will lead to success in corporate politics. Just don't expect their needs to be about building decent products.
I work at a big company. There are parts that are nepotistic and there are parts less so. I just utilize the parts that work.
It’s like a restaurant that has bad food. Do I avoid the restaurant? No I still go and get the 1 good dish.
Why would I deprive myself because the restaurant doesn’t tick every box? On the other hand, why would I go in ever thinking it’s a good restaurant?
In this case that means being in that golf game or figuring out a way how you can use corruption to get good outcomes done.
Or, more likely if your moral compass is sound, quit and find an organisation that isn’t like this.
While I agree with you that random corporate world does behave this way, companies where founders are still around - don’t - because they’re mission driven.
Nothing wrong with being good at golf above if you want to. However this is about politics and that just means good enough to play and talk about the game.
edit: over par not under...
1-2 over par is shooting 90-100 which is much more achievable :)
Who is going to do your job while you stroke egos?
Victim blaming as usual. The problem is you don't do the CTO's job in addition to your own....f-off with that hustle life nonsense.
the important point is to be known a few levels up. That will get you places.
i'm not good at this, but people who are have gone farther than me.
Non-technical skills matter. People and organizations have multi-faceted incentives. If you think the incentives of the people making decisions are leading to bad outcomes, then learn how to make that heard to them. Learn the situation as they see it, and use your own, better-aligned(?) incentives to improve the organization. And if it's not worth trying, so be it. But you need to accept that much of the world is you live in will continue to be shaped by the people who care enough to see "that hustle life nonsense" as a worthwhile trade.
Doing weird shit like learning & going golfing just to keep idiots from making bad decisions shouldn't be part of our jobs.
[1] I don't think "victim" is a good term; we can always go get other jobs or drive a school bus instead
Playing golf alone will not get you in the circle.
Even if you never played golf getting invited to play golf by someone from the circle gets you play the golf.
If you are not the type or not the material you won’t be invited.
I am senior devsecops and save company from crashing once a year - people like me. But business guys get to play golf I am just a worker bee for them.
You're arguing against a point they weren't making, I think
note that you need lots of other social skills to use this opportunity. They are playing a game and you are a side character - if you say too much you are out of line. However you can talk for 2 minutes (out of more than an hour long round) - use your minute well.
Another way to look at it is that your role isn't in the decision making circle, even if you are on a project that is supposed to help make a decision. I was in this role evaluating vendors solutions, in hindsight I can see how I conflated the involvement in the evaluation process with the decision making, those aren't the same.
Think of it like buying a car. You could be on the project to evaluate car companies, features, test drive them and document findings but just because you did all of that doesn't mean you're a decision maker and shouldn't have any emotional attachment to whatever the decision ends up being. Yes if they make a decision with bad trade-offs, like a car with a lot of issues, you may be dealing with those and it may suck but that's your role.
I think part of politics around technical decisions is recognizing if your role has any attributes of being involved with the decision making or if your input is just one of many, potentially minor, inputs.
This is really good advice for anyone working in a large corporation.
Every Oracle adoption for the past 40 years
You're just naming legitimate stakeholders (the C-suite) and asserting that they're illegitimate.
I grant you that playing golf is a cartoonishly pathological [1] version of it, but yes, there are always people more powerful than you in the organization, and if they have an opinion on what you should be doing, then you can either try to convince them (i.e. politics), or you can give up. Not playing is not an option, and being obstinate is a good way to get fired.
So maybe a case of HN comments being "more on point than the article", but primarily in the way that it directly illustrates what the author is saying: engineers routinely bail out of the politics, to their own detriment.
(FWIW, all of the items in the parent comment's list are even less extreme, and more reasonable, than your own. For example, if you throw up your hands in disgust simply because your colleagues want to use a new tool, you're gonna have a bad career.)
[1] and likely apocryphal - there’s probably something going on that is more rational, and characterizing it as “picking the golf buddy” is a cope.
IDK about everyone else, but I pretty routinely bail out of the politics of decisions when it's mostly to the company's detriment. Starts to look like an uphill battle against people above me on the food chain? Sure man, go ahead, not my money you're wasting. The only politicking worth doing in those cases is making sure I'm outside the blast radius if it's something so bad it's gonna eventually blow up. Luckily big businesses move so slowly that this rarely takes less than a year, and often quite a bit more.
However...
> I pretty routinely bail out of the politics of decisions when it's mostly to the company's detriment.
Maybe your judgment of "detriment" is right, maybe it's wrong, but the point of the article is that too many engineers want to do what you're doing as some kind of misguided purity play.
On the contrary, you can absolutely opt out of this stuff if your skills are valuable enough. Maybe you could get a bit more money or status by participating actively in corporate politics, but often the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
When it comes to stupid decisions in the c-suite that affect me at work, I use Colin Powell’s advice to ‘disagree, but commit’. The COO isn’t going to appreciate me calling him an idiot because of some policy he put into place. I comply and move on with my life. If the bullshit stacks up too high, move on.
Sometimes falling short, maybe by just a hair, sometimes not :\
I worked at a place where without any of the tech staff knowing about it, the CEO literally signed a $600k/yr Adobe Experience Manager contract on a golf course with the Adobe Salesweasel, and it didn't get used at all. As far as anyone knows that bill got paid for two more years before that same CEO flew the whole company into the ground leaving ~100 people not only out of work, but unpaid for their last month and without their last 3 months worth of entitlements paid.
1) Since around 2008 I’ve had 8 jobs after staying at my second job for nine years. Whether I was laid off or chose to get another job because of salary compression and inversion, being able to get a job quickly - and it’s never taken me more than a month even in 2023 and last year - was partially because at now 51, I have made damn sure I stay up to date with real world use of the “latest hotness”.
2) see #1
3) if you are a VC backed company, your shining light is not “make a good product”. It’s “the exit” and shortly afterwards a blog post about “our amazing journey” where they announce the product is going to be shut down.
The goal of politics in the office is not to do “the right thing”. It’s to stay in alignment with the people who control your paycheck and to make sure you can keep exchanging money for labor when time comes to her another job.
Some examples:
Some might want to work on an interesting project with a new technology, even though it isn’t a recognized fit for your company.
Some prefer to build strong and trusted relationships for referrals later.
Some people will pursue aims that are to the detriment of their company. *
It is wise to recognize the diversity of goals in people around you.
* Getting great alignment is not easy. Not with people, not with highly capable intelligent agents trained with gradient descent that will probably operate outside their training distribution. Next time you think a powerful AI agent will do everything in your interests, ask yourself if your employee will do everything you want, just as you would want it.
Big decisions are almost always made on factors that are more relationship based than technical based at the end of the day.
Many highly technical people despise management, MBAs, and anything in that orbit. This is understandable, but leads to a lot of frustration.
If you truly want to guide major decisions you are going to be more effective at the top of the stack than the bottom. Every tier has trade offs, and you are almost always having to sell some part of your soul to truly move up.
Like it or not, most technical companies these days are managed to short terms goals and payouts. The C Suite, investors, etc are all just there for a payday. The actual product or anything else is just a detail in the goal of collecting commas. If you recognize this, you have a better chance of managing your own expectations at whatever level you are in the org. If you spend your time fighting for something that is not truly the goal of the company you will tend to have a bad time overall.
For a very long time it was the only thing I focused. Quite often the job itself is pretty easy, getting in is the hard part.
In the past couple of years I let it slide a bit because keeping yourself sharp for interviews is sort of a pain in the ass, but I promised nyself that 2026 I'm back at it
With those roles, it’s all about soft skill behavioral interviews and system design. I can do those in my sleep. I just keep a career document of all of my major projects and describe them in STAR format so I can review them when needed.
I was never interested in other roles.
I was very much and I am very much an IC. I chose a path to manage and deliver projects with about half and half hands on keyboard coding and the other half dealing with “the business” and not manage people. But if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, “codez real gud” only gets you to a mid level role.
There are pros and cons about being in a "commoditizable" role. I honestly am not worried at all about AI.
> It’s also harder to stand out from the crowd if (the royal) you has as your only vector of competition is an ability to do coding interviews.
Which is why I said that the best skill I ever acquired was "how to be interviewed".
> But if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, “codez real gud” only gets you to a mid level role.
I just wanted enough that I could afford a house and raising a family. Mid level role provides that, and it is what I optimized for.
It’s a shit show out here right now. It’s actually worse than the dot com bust. I had no trouble getting jobs then as an enterprise dev working in Atlanta with four years of experience.
Have you looked for a job post 2022? My experience in 2023 and 2024 when I was looking for a bog standard enterprise dev job (twice) that needed AWS experience. Mind you in 2023, I had 5 years of AWS experience leading projects with hands on keyboard work including 3 working directly for AWS leading projects at AWS ProServe.
A) submitting my resume for standard enterprise dev jobs blindly to ATS’s using LinkedIn Easy Apply, Indeed, etc: I submitted hundreds of resumes and heard crickets. LinkedIn shows you how many people applied, if your application has been viewed and how often your resume has been viewed. Maybe 3-5x my application was even looked at.
B) Targeted outreach to internal recruiters based on a niche of niche in AWS where I was an industry wide subject matter expert [1] - two interviews one offer.
C) reaching out to my network based again not on them wanted someone who could code - coders are a dine a dozen. They wanted someone who was hands on but also had a history of working through all of the complexities of dealing with organizations and “getting things done”. I had two full time offers and one short term side contract.
The three offers came within two weeks. It would have been a lot harder no matter how well I could do on a coding interview to stave out.
That was in 2023. A year later I was let go of the shitty company that I did accept the offer from through my outreach to recruiters. I got an offer from responding to an internal recruiter for the job I have now within three weeks. But I also did the randomly submitting my resume again while I was waiting with the same results.
42 here. I still didn't hit that wall. I presume it does exist, yes. That said, I noticed over time that it is becoming more common to see older engineers than it used to be.
Migrating to managerial roles for me is a no-go however. I can't stand managing people.
> Have you looked for a job post 2022?
Yes, I switched jobs last time in 2023. I still get invitations for interviews, though not as often as it used to be, say, in between 2015-2021.
However, I live in Europe. I have the impression that things are not as dire here as they are in your side lf the pond in terms of employment in IT.
> They wanted someone who was hands on but also had a history of working through all of the complexities of dealing with organizations and “getting things done”.
I mean, that is very important in IC roles. Part of my interview prep is a very detailed account of multiple projects I participated in STAR format, highlighting it from inception to delivery, including outcomes.
All that said, I think things are going to be in a slump for a while longer, and might get worse next year. It's a bad time to be job-hopping. I do interviews here and there only to keep myself sharp.
We are in complete agreement here. I don’t manage people directly. But being responsible for projects that involve a other people does require you to know how to peer feedback, use soft skills etc.
> However, I live in Europe. I have the impression that things are not as dire here as they are in your side lf the pond in terms of employment in IT.
Probably not as bad and to be fair, if I were still looking for in office jobs in Atlanta where I spent my career from 1996-2020 working locally, it would have been easier. I assume in Europe you’re also not dealing with competing against the young tech bros.
> I mean, that is very important in IC roles. Part of my interview prep is a very detailed account of multiple projects I participated in STAR format, highlighting it from inception to delivery, including outcomes.
Thats definitely not mid level pulling tickets off a board behavior (that’s a compliment btw). I think we are in “violent agreement”.
So yeah, I totally agree with you. Understanding the business is important in that sense. Especially when communicating the outcome of projects to non-technical stakeholders. I go out of my way on my current role to produce metrics that I can graph to show the positive outcomes of projects.
One of the things I learned is that non-technical people in particular love this sort of eye-candy. I don't say this in a derogatory way, it is a good way to communicate stuff.
I fully agree with this after attempting to ‘do the right thing’ and getting nowhere. I don’t have all of the information the decision makers have, so I may not have the full picture. Even if it’s a bad decision, it’s out of my hands. Now I do what Colin Powell advised: “disagree and commit”. You can’t win every battle, so you’ll have to accept certain decisions and move on, and accomplish your goals regardless.
Another point worth bringing up is that sometimes, that stuff doesn't matter. I see so many engineers get hopelessly invested in technical debates that are, honestly, just silly: it's often better for the company to get something barely-good-enough done quickly than to flesh out the "optimal" design over the course of weeks or months, and over the dead bodies of people who have a different opinion about vi-versus-emacs.
And even if you accumulate tech debt, it is sometimes a wise decision to pay it back later, when you (hopefully) have more money and time.
So, I'd add "pick your battles wisely" to the list of tips.
And yes, this kind of shit happens regularly - sometimes, people even get busted for it like that Netflix executive who got kickbacks from, amongst others, Netskope [1].
Let's be real: no matter how good you are at networking - unless you come from Old Money or have a wildly successful exit under your belt, you are not joining the club of elite morons that actually pulls the strings.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executiv...
With good leadership, politics won't feel like politics. Everything this article describes as "good politics" is definitely good stuff to do, but none of it should feel like politics to your typical "I hate politics" engineer. Building relationships? That's just meeting interesting coworkers. Understanding the real incentives? That's keeping the big picture in mind, a standard requirement for any engineer. Managing up effectively? A good manager will treat you like the expert that you are and that happens automatically. Creating win-win situations? That's that big picture thing again. Being visible? Who doesn't like to share the cool stuff they've done?
I hate politics. I do all of those "good politics" things and I enjoy all of it. It might technically be "politics" but it's not what we think of when we say the word.
This article boils down to a semantic argument. They want to carve out a section of the job and put it under the label of "politics" when most of us would not put it there. That label may be right, it may be wrong, but I don't really care. It's just not an interesting argument. I think this article would be a lot better if it dropped the P word entirely and just explained why and how you should do the "good" things it lists.
Certainly many would prefer to just enter flow state and work on their craft, work the wood with the chisel (=do the engineering work), etc. It is of course not a good strategy in reality, and it doesn't matter what people "want", but let's at least admit that plenty of people don't enjoy having to interact a lot. People-oriented vs thing-oriented.
Oh lord, I have seen some nonsense built because some prospective investor wanted to see us "do something with AI" lest we be "left behind" somehow.
more often that not its based on feeling
* 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.
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 )
My first company got bought out and the CEO went around awarding bonuses. It was a calculus of around ( 0.4 * salary * number of years ).
When it was my turn, he double-checked with HR that I had worked there as long as I had
I was super jr, but sat next to his office. Didn't know I existed.
Thanks for the link and perspective
So you can get only get to the top when you spread coins around.
There is a very clear and well established path to the top for people who only care about themselves.
No that's not how I define personal success. But that's also not relevant to this.
So you have this weird contradiction where you're expected to work as part of a team, but then measured on your own contributions in a vacuum. So if you take credit for the team's effort, you're the bad guy who gets rewarded, but if you admit it was a team effort and take credit only for your contributions, you're forgotten for not having enough impact.
E.g. if I add some new feature to a tool and deploy it, I'll say "we've just pushed X...". If I do 99% of some particular feature, I'll still say "we've added Y...". In an annual review I can still speak to what I specifically did. I have probably been lucky in the teams and team sizes I've been in, but I've not had a problem with this.
For context I've mainly stuck to small (<50) and medium (<500) companies. My one experience (due to acquisition) of directly working within a 5000+ company was certainly starting to feel like what you described, I got out.
That means that if all you did was work that only involved your own labor instead of work that involves being over an initiative that involved other people, you can’t be promoted above a mid level developer (no matter your title). You didn’t show that you can work at a larger “scope”.
You can look at the leveling guidelines for almost any tech company.
Even if you are a mid level ticket taker, you should at least try to talk to whoever your project manager is and take responsibility for delivering an “epic” or “workstream” that will show that you are coordinating a larger deliverable.
In sufficiently small companies yes it makes sense for everyone. In larger and more regimented companies doing the Greenfield project can (and often does) lead to promotions and higher earnings.
Teamwork is fine, but when salaries and promotions are individually negotiated you have to look after number one.
The level of politics, promotion, promotion packets, leveling is a whole different level. That is not to start on PIP, hire to fire, etc...
You need to know the game if you're going to play it.
I have the highest rank and salary on my team. I am more than happy to send high visibility work to my aspiring team mates. What goes around comes around, if not in the form of immediate salary then in the form of connections and references down the road (which is a much bigger driver of salary and rank anyway).
Playing a zero-sum game at work at the expense of your colleagues is penny wise, pound foolish, even if you truly do only care about yourself.
I'm not against spreading credit. I'm against misrepresenting situations to spread false credit, which creates incorrect perceptions and leads to poor decision making and political tension. If an individual did a unit of work, I will acknowledge that, to the extent that it is true. If an individual jumped on a grenade and did unpopular work, I will praise that individual for doing that work.
This is not antagonism towards teamwork, it's to make the team function better by ensuring information propagation is accurate, that the people pulling the weight in the team feel recognized, and that free riders are held to account which is a form of respect to the productive team members.
Nobody likes people who take credit for others work and it will be quickly found out. Particularly if the work gets critiqued and you are asked to stand by it.
This isn't some fancy law, but general decency.
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.
That's actually exactly how I think about this, let me explain my analysis.
I view it as the composition of two games. "Should we pursue the spoils?" is the first game, and the correct strategy is to play that game and coordinate with people to play it.
The zero sum game is dividing the spoils, this is conditioned on having won the first game. As long as everyone is guaranteed enough of the spoils ahead of time for the game to be positive EV, they will play it, and continue playing games like it.
When you apply this to a company, this is just an issue of mechanism design (inverse game theory). Why weren't you architecting the game that the employees play, such that there is relatively little to be gained from the zero sum game, and most of the value comes from the magnitude of contribution to the positive sum game?
Ideally people play a positive sum game with their coworkers that is tied to revenue and their contributions to it, to the tune of 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars a year, while the zero sum game is only worth 1000s of dollars a year.
Say everyone is compensated with equity. The goal is to increase share value. Yes every action that each employee takes in theory is going to be toward that goal because that's how they're incentivized through the compensation. But in reality you do a performance review and you have to decide how much some person contributed to the overall result, which isn't possible to objectively determine. And in that space of perception and subjectivity is were politics, or as I call it social arbitrage opportunity, exists.
How would such a positive-sum game look? I'm lacking imagination because I've never worked in an environment with such a positive game.
More to the point, it reflects the failure of higher-level management to construct proper policies, processes, team interfaces, and incentive structures for teams, so that the team leads will be set up to give their engineers all the ingredients for happiness at work: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Constructing proper policies, processes, team interfaces, and incentive structures is really hard and much harder to well than most people give credit for. It is virtually always bespoke, building on individual personalities and the tools available. Balancing policies and processes with agility requires significant self-discipline on the part of upper-management to not just run roughshod over their policies and processes.
The question is whether you're optimistic or pessimistic about your upper-management. If you're optimistic about them, then you have Lawful Good upper-management that is interested in building out these governing structures that are needed for building collaborative culture. But if you accept that the vast majority of upper-management is human and flawed (like the rest of us), and there are very few Lawful Good upper-managers around, then you accept politics as a necessary evil, at least in that particular organization.
This necessitates collaborative information synthesis to resolve uncertainty uniformly to then be able to play a positive sum game under constraints. This is possible but it necessitates exchange of information between different business functions.
As informational clarity is a communicative process with repetitive feedback cycles, it will tend to have a big delay in the overarching system of decision-making. Therefore a shortcut is to influence, i.e. use conviction processes to shorten the cycle, rather than repeat to arbitrary infinity in order to drive perfect information alignment.
Therefore influencing is a necessary component even in an otherwise perfectly healthy and incentive aligned positive sum system of rational actors - and politics are influencing.
The problem becomes when conviction isn’t used as shortcut for informational clarity but as a method of exploitation of irrationality of human actors - this is bad politics.
What I do agree with is that putting in place right incentives, processes and organisational structure minimises politics - and in an org with rational actors this is the goal.
But good luck hiring perfectly rational actors in each function, that will still behave rationally in an economic downturn :).
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.
Not to disagree with you overall, but I would argue that very much is politics! In other words, how do you influence "the system"? How do you sway people to your point of view, how do you get them to follow your ideas and plans?
You need your interests to be their interests, and that involves speaking their language. Some people you might persuade because they too think your idea is the right one, some you might persuade by trading favors, some you might persuade by convincing them it's the most cost-effective, etc. as described here.
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...
Employment politics has always meant: brown nosing, throwing vulnerable people under the bus, posturing, taking credit for other people's contributions, blaming other people for your failures, and on and on.
Or to use the language of TFA, "iNfLUeNcE".
"Bad politics" comes straight from the top.
Certainly the things you’re talking about are real, and particularly severe in some environments, but there’s a lot of room to improve your influence without engaging in any of that.
I think their point is that you can have influence without doing these things.
As if anyone, myself included, would suggest that my listed items are the only way to influence your employer is a hilariously bad faith read.
I take issue with TFA framing the problem of people saying they hate "employment politics" as a you problem when I am of the opinion it is a leadership problem. Bad leaders fail to, or refuse to, see the things I listed as "bad politics".
Just take my supplements, bro. It'll fix your "soft skills", bro.
If you want to significantly influence a lot of high-level strategic decision-making at very large companies, then you do probably need to engage in nasty things like that. But most of us don’t work at that scope.
Not OP but I honestly don't see how this comment/tone is warranted in response to what they wrote.
Hearing about "politics" in a neutral/positive way would be new to me.
That's just a difference in framing between winners and losers.
If you get your way, you say it was due to influence, bridge building, teamwork, etc.
If you don't, you say "politics".
For every occasion someone says "politics" negatively, realize the other party is using the other framing.
More importantly: For every time you get your way, the other party is saying "Politics!"
s/other than/in addition to/
That's the fundamental disagreement in this thread.
I agree in principle, but this whole topic needs some definitions so we're all on the same terms. "Politics" can have several different meanings.
But, of course, it was never true. It might have felt true - certainly superficially - when we were a smaller company, but the reality is that it never was. We just didn't want to be grown up enough to admit that.
You can only really interface effectively with reality and make good decisions when you face up to that reality rather than living in denial. Or, as one of my favourite quotes (albeit that it's now a bit overused), from Miyamoto Musashi, puts it: “Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie.”
So that company maintained the "no politics" value for long years after it became apparent to anyone with a working brain that it wasn't true. Wasn't even close to true.
And that's poison: it bleeds into everything. Avoidance of the truth promotes avoidance elsewhere. Lack of openness, lack of accountability, perverse mythologies, bitterness, resentment, and a sort of gently corrosive low grade mendacity that eats away at everything. And all because we're lying to ourselves about "no politics".
So I agree: politics is unavoidable and, if we are to succeed, we must do so by becoming politicians, and admitting to both ourselves and to others that we're doing it, because success cannot be sustained without that, and we also can't help others to reach their full potential unless we are honest with ourselves and eachother.
[0] And certainly I'd say that I hated politics and wanted no part of it.
Anything that violates those core precepts are rejected out of hand, and often times for things that would support the companies stated principles.
I have worked 20+ jobs in my life, and either petty bullshit or greed rules the top of the heap in all but the most particular circumstances. I cant even remember how many meetings I have setup with CEO's to hand feed them information and cheer them on like a toddler so they can make the obviously correct decision.
"What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it."
This is a sort of hard truth about why people avoid hard truths. Telling a truth-avoidant person (which is most of us on at least a few topics) things like this will have very little impact. In fact they've probably already stopped listening.
[0] I was going to say "in the short term" but as someone suffering long-term emotional pain over facing relatively minor truths, well, I'm not sure that qualifier is appropriate.
These truths (whatever they may be) will come to you at random times, mostly when you're not wanting them which makes it even more difficult to deal with. So when they come to you naturally (and they will) , you try to push the thoughts away.
Better is to realize the truths and bring them up at your own time. Think about the hard truths that bring emotional pain when you have control over your personal environment. This way you may be better equipped to deal with it.
I don't want to assign any words or practices for this because there are many, but framing it this way helps.
I think this is false in an interpersonal relationship context. Acknowledging something can make it worse.
I often think about a scene from Friends, with the following setup:
- Phoebe is visited, by surprise, by a character unknown to the audience.
- We learn that he is her husband, that he is a gay figure skater, and that the marriage was proposed as one of convenience, allowing him to get a green card by marrying an American.
- We learn that Phoebe agreed to the marriage because she was in love with him and wished she could be his wife.
- The reason for his return is that he's realized he isn't gay, and he wants to get a divorce from Phoebe so that he can marry another woman.
Phoebe naturally finds this distressing. Eventually she agrees to the divorce, but just before handing over the paperwork, she asks him whether, if he had realized earlier, she could have been the one he married (for love).
And then she immediately interrupts to say "Never mind, I don't think there's any answer that would make me feel better."
I am interested in the idea that any answer to this question would make Phoebe feel worse. I agree with it. But it's not obvious why it should be the case that every possible resolution is a step down from no resolution. On an expected value basis it cannot be the case.
A long time ago but in a place not so far away, as a teenager with some love drama, I once was completely cured from a weeklong lost love hangover in a second when I realized I never had a chance to begin with. That was a very enlightening moment about how "love" works. My brain let go of the idea and that was that, I was free again with zero negative effects remaining.
While it cannot be controlled at will like moving an arm, attitude does have a big influence. You can make your brain move towards letting go. That's not covered by my anecdote where I discovered the effect by accident, that is something I realized over time. Avoidance or confrontation (of the problem) is, I think, neutral, it can work with either.
I love your excellent example, as well as the counterexample below from nosianu. Thanks for commenting.
By her asking the question out loud to him, made this situation real (which she has probably practiced a million times in her head). At that very moment she self-realized the resolution she needed. He didn't have to answer because she found it herself. But only by him being there for her to ask the question was it possible.
She says she doesn't feel better, but the confrontation actually did and she can move on.
I dont know about that, denial is a powerful force.
From https://www.way-of-the-samurai.com/miyamoto-musashi-quotes.h... :
> Musashi did not say this. This comes from a less than accurate “interpretation” of Musashi’s life and work by D. E. Tarver who repeats several fictions and myths about Musashi (hiding under bodies for 3 days at the battle of Sekigahara etc). He includes this line, “Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie” in the final paragraph of the Fire Scroll introduction. No such Miyamoto Musashi quotes appear in the Japanese, nor in any of the credible English translations.
However, I don't know that it erodes the value of the quote which, taken in isolation, rings true. Even, of all things, a Batman movie[0], and Battlestar Galactica[1] (!) have managed to drop some remarkably profound truths on occasion which has made me relatively unfussy about where one can find truth.
At the same time I do like to give due credit so I'll be sure to reference the correct source in future. Thank you, once again.
[0] "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." - seen this one play out first hand multiple times in corporate life, specifically in leadership.
[1] "You cannot play God then wash your hands of the things that you've created. Sooner or later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore." - take heed, Mark Zuckerberg.
I did too. It was something the CEO started saying after a particularly brutal game of thrones style purge.
I think a lot of times company values are simply "things the company did and perhaps still does for which it feels shame".
Companies are all about making money, and politics is one way to achieve that. Saying "no politics" is like asking employees to not care about money, it is not going to happen, and there is an implicit "but it doesn't apply to me".
One is a cordial game of soft power exchange, getting things done and everyone winning at the end of the day. No malicious intent, just day to day frustrations boiling over here & there. Tomorrow is another, we are friends again tomorrow & will succeed tomorrow. Forgiveness & forgetting is in good supply. Some amount of grace is allowed, no drawing blood. Help each other up when down (even if via manipulation).
The other kind of politics is basically a blood sport. Its a game of hard power exchange where people try to dominate and humiliate each other. There is almost no self-preservation, no care about tomorrow, no learning, no adapting - only the next way to slaughter you opponent, setting legal traps, messing with their personal lives. Zero grace. These kinds of games & people often do not care about the the goal, the company or product - they only care about winning at the blood sport and each interaction for them is a way to gather data, search for weak spots and so on. Its not enough to win, you have to humiliate and oppress another's spirit. Kick the person while they are down. Certain corps attracts a couple of these contestants and soon you have a full floor of psycho's playing a vicious game. For them it feels normal.
So its best to find groups/companies with good people that plays the gentle game (and keeping the bad apples out), that knows it is all made up & essentially role play, that doesn't crave blood. Its the only places where you can really succeed as a human. The other kind you only succeed at drawing blood and destroying others, while enjoying it.
Or perhaps, more accurately, they're drawn to places without defenses: both those that are pretend egalitarian but have informal power hierarchies without accountability; as well as those that outright say "we're in it for the game", like the stereotypical high-pressure investment bank.
Most of engineers are rather introverts with rich internal life and strong imagination. You can lose most of it and transform for more 'success' over time, but at great costs to yourself. I am not arguing against say better communication or organizational skills, we all benefit from it, but you can't avoid various form of highly functioning sociopaths once you climb above ground level. Those tend to drag weaker individuals down to their rabbit holes. That's the core of the 'politics' I've seen over past 20 years in all corporations I've worked for. Looking at people and measuring how good relationship is right now, how you can use them, how worthy they are. Forging alliances always doing such calculus in your mind, everything is a chess board, everybody is a chess figure.
Don't forget how you behave and think at work will end up permeating rest of your life, you are just you in all places. One example I see very consistently - folks promoted to more responsibility get over time much bigger egos, very few are immune to this and one has to realize it and actively fight it to avoid it.
Be a good human being, help others in need, be a properly good parent, husband, son/daughter, friend. For many folks high on organizational charts, in above metrics they failed in life while drowning in money of career. No thank you.
When people say "no politics" they mean have a position on certain issues that mostly are off topic in a business environment.
For example if I have my group where nobody is religeous. You could rant about how stupid religeous people are because nobody would feel particularly attacked and some would nod along. Disregarding that the pittyful self-revelation from pointing at others calling them stupid, this is a political stance.
But we employ people from all over the world and viewpoints change. Some don't have the most dense main stream belief you find everywhere. You don't go into the next office and pronounce how atheism is the best thing. That is meant with "no politics". It is a requirement for multi-cultural exchange without immediate conflict. It is of course not restricted to religion.
The auther misunderstood what politics means. What he describes is office and relationship dynamics. There is quite a bit of overlap, especially when it comes to signal your viewpoints and perspectives in the hope to get recognition. I would be careful about that in a professional environment though. Depends on the company and how many cultures meet each other in random watercooler talk.
You can convolute the terms here, but it just blurrs the precision of any statement.
That said, relationship dynamics or "power play" leads to an effect where the most competent people often aren't the most well liked people. That is unfortunate and not very new. But the problem cannot be adressed by "talking more about politics". On the contrary, it would make things much, much worse.
But you are right that the author is mixing things up: Office politics isn't collaboration as described in the article. Office politics refers to things like one-upmanship, taking credit for stuff, playing the blame game - making yourself look good and others look bad, to get raises or promotions. Or for a phrase used in the article, office politics is about becoming a scheming backstabber.
It can also be the opposite.
Making yourself indispensable. Being the one who shows up for people (not as in "comes in and does a lot of unpaid work", but as in "helps out when other people need it"). Giving people credit where credit is due, especially the unsung heroes.
If you are well-known around the office as the person who is honest, kind, and helpful, the next time someone else tries to take credit for your work, make you look bad, or otherwise stab you in the back, it's much less likely to work—and when that kind of thing fails, it invariably makes the person who tries it look much, much worse.
Often times, doing the good stuff and building credit for that takes a long time and the right environment to identify and credit it.
Playing the politics game is much faster/easier and leads to quick results, because all you have to do is be visible as much as possible and manipulate a little bit here and there.
People aren't great at identifying the career manipulator and in the short term will give those guys the promotion/responsibility.
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.
This is my rebuttal about the nuance of being an employee.
An engineer avoids "politics" - as a vital protection mechanism against getting himself fired.
Often autistic ( my case ), technical, hard working, constantly exposed to poor decisions, lies, manipulations. The one thing the engineer can hold sacred is the technical truth. It is his one true avatar. To align himself with that, but not SPEAK FOR IT. To let his actions , the code, the technical implementation speak for him. IF a poor technical decision was pushed by higher ups, then accept it and implement. After all that is why there are 3 layers of management between him and the leadership who came up or approved the idea without him. The engineer stands for his work and his agreed role. The fruits of the companys efforts and failings become apparent through that. Why would a lowly paid engineer put his neck on the line to disagree with management and potentially embarrass someone? or worse?
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, however 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.
tl:dr; OPs opinion "could sound" in parts, like upper management blaming the code monkey for not being aggressive enough in the board meeting, where about 4 tiers of middle management stood in there with him, secretly 2 are having an affair in the toilets, 1 is someones nephew who doesnt work, another is terrified of being replaced by his underlings, none know anything about the project specs, ready to PIP him for speaking up and making them look slightly incompetent, or perhaps wondering outloud why a poor decision was being floated which was clearly some machination involving the powers that be to co-exist with other nebulous contracts and corporate entities. A terrible decision that would cost the company millions in the long term, but which would enable the current c-suite to look good before departing to other roles ala yahoo. If Ive offended some upper manager, Im sorry.
If you find the personal part difficult then what I recommend folks dodo is pay attention to the flows of money, time, and communication that happen. Most of the time analyzing the patterns of how work is accomplished will tell you just as much about who is going to come out on top in a new paradigm as anything else.
After that it’s about “scope” and “impact”. You can’t have either without managing up, down and horizontally.
office politicians believe in focusing on politics (relationships) and putting their name on as much progress as possible and getting facetime with higher ups.
watch for it in meetings: do not accept work assigned to you by a peer, push back on the boss going along with a peer assigning you work, and do not accept a peer volunteering to do the presentation while you get started on grunt work. that person is planning to "coordinate" your work and put s/he's name on it and give the presentation to higher ups.
you do the presentation, you talk to higher ups. somebody wants to help? they need to take their share of the grunt work, earn their way in like you did.
This stands in stark contrast to the genai, ai-first nature of every company today.
In fact, almost every point made in this article is completely wrong from my experience in FAANG. It's almost always, 'my way or the highway' from leadership. Jump aboard or get left behind.
"The alternative to good politics isn’t no politics. It’s bad politics winning by default. It’s the loud person who’s wrong getting their way because the quiet person who’s right won’t speak up. It’s good projects dying because nobody advocated for them."
- again, genai - Amazon RTO - Meta's metaverse forray. - etc.
You might think the people doing politics are manipulative ladder climbers, but they're climbing the same ladders available to you, so you should be one too.
I clicked hoping to find am argument to the engineering community at large to recognize the political aspects of our work.
Although I guess the basic argument still applies.
Please don't. I'm sick of watching your Power Points.
> But they’re not willing to do what it takes to influence those decisions.
This is true, and it remains true for me after reading your article.
I 100% agree that your approach is an effective way to move your organization forward, but one teeny weeny detail you're omitting is that if you continue to do this you will no longer be an individual contributor and will instead be management. You will gradually cede all of your time to this cause of championing good ideas and will have no time left for doing any of the work yourself.
I think most of the so-called cynics know the role of politics. It's not that they are ignorant, it's that they want their management to take care of it.
You can often disprove this idea by just asking about the decision. The objections are often raised. That doesn't mean people take them seriously.
People have all sorts of strange biases and irrationality.
This is how I feel, and this is what I tell people when they don't want to get involved in the organization's politics.
It does not matter how right you are if no one likes or will listen to you. Unfortunately, being likeable is inifinitely more important than being right. Your job is to strike a balance between both otherwise stupid likeable people will be dictating the direction.
It's not really about being "likeable", but being persuasive. Don't put the cart before the horse.
You're correct that being right isn't enough, but if you make being likeable a direct goal you will come off as insincere and fail.
I share my opinions, accomplishments, and (most importantly) my failures. This tends to make me a default leader in conversations, and I try really hard not to be overbearing.
ADHD + outspoken = confrontational / obnoxious.
"Politics" is the word we use to refer to coordination mechanisms.
> Think about the last time a terrible technical decision got pushed through at your company.
There were other interlinked concerns that were more important. "Yes that probably would be better, except that it's not consistent with what we've told the auditors. So it's not happening."
.
> Stop Avoiding Politics
Not everyone needs to stick their oar in on every decision.
> Ideas don’t speak. People do. And the people who understand how to navigate organizational dynamics, build relationships, and yes, play politics? Their ideas get heard.
Yeah, no shit dude. That's exactly the part that's disgusting. Using the word "just" here feels dishonest.
I was subjected early on to someone who viewed every single interaction in every single relationship as transactional and framed every decision around the question "what's in it for me?"
It really warped my worldview for a long time and it took a ton of therapy and self-reflection to overcome. I'm not going to sacrifice my principles just to get something I want.
I simply refuse to let the end justify the means, whatever that end is.
I want no part in "it's not what you know" kinds of situations. I'm paid for what I know. The author seems to think being apolitical means not giving your input or making decisions. If I'm not allowed to do that without sucking up to the higher-ups, I'll find another job. Everyone I respect is above politics.
Anonymous feedback is almost always destructive, the exception being when the leaders of large organizations seek employee sentiment.
This isn't an article about improving organizations, this is an article about getting what you want within an organization by getting better at playing politics.
Or, the people with the decision making power just had a different opinion made a decision irrespective of "right information"
It's likely to turn out everyone is NOT an idiot and there are very logical & understandable reasons for why things are the way they are. Or not, in which case you can run away secure that you've made the right conclusion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
"The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics" (2022, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith)
https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
Both publications cover the politics of most firms with stakeholders. =3
let them careen off a cliff, the cash in your bank account matters. we get paid enough not to care. just buy LEAPs on VOO or a hot sector's ETF, its literally that easy.
in my experience this take has gotten me promoted, sometimes I take it. cash cash cash.
In reality, the manager already has a perception for both and knows the outcome. The team is aware of that perception, and would not dare to correct it or give a surprise because that is not going to benefit them. Bosses don't like their hard-earned perceptions being corrected. No surprises please. The weaker would realize this perceptional power and bow out even if their view point has merit. Manager would thank both for sorting it out.
You can't engage in gladiator fights against bad and powerful people. You are more likely to hurt yourself than influencing the decisions. The audience may clap and encourage the fight, but they are not completely neutral.
Each person gains their power by perception (from their boss or co-workers). They can use this power to shut you off. So, from an individual perspective, you need to choose what's best for you based on how powerful you are. Simply getting into politics without such assessment is foolish.
The whole point of collaboration is to build the perceptional power. Also, being in higher position keeps you in loop for all communication giving you more access to the on-goings and opportunity to get visibility. This increases the perceptional power.
People hoard information. It's a treasure and sometimes their whole career depends on keeping it as secret. Also people hoard work items. Just having a long queue of work also gives power. Atleast you have a lot to talk about and possibly grow your team.
If you tend to skew towards the first group, supporting underdogs and people abused by the company, then supporting them is morally right but net negative to your personal career. Only people who skew to the second category should really engage in office politics.
Also, in my experience, it's generally true that the people who don't like engaging in politics are often better at making good decisions which benefit the group. They tend to be more logical and more team-focused; less emotional and less self-centered. This probably explains a lot of our political problems.
It's probably bad career advice to completely avoid politics (most places aren't doing great work) but it depends on what you're optimizing for.
The problem with everyone getting into the political game is that then we have everyone talking and noone building.
Early in my career our boss let us drink at work. He knew most work was done in the morning and so he allowed us to drink in the afternoon. Worked fine up until someone was having a bad home life and got smashed at work. Then drunk drove to a client and the client realized he was drunk. I wasnt privy to what happened with that, but then we lost the ability to drink.
Not a problem for me... I rarely drank. Everyone else went on a quiet strike. The boss was a huge prick micromanager, the guys wanted to quit because it changed things; but they simply stopped doing work. Every ticket was created and then sent to the queue. Bare minimum got worked on. Months go by and the strike quietly lifted. The drunk guy found a new job.
Months later at lunch they were trying to convince me to get drinking back; but they were trying to manipulate me. They were playing a power game to do it.
So I "fall" into their trap and go talk to the boss. argue about the 5 monkeys, that leave the rule of no drinking in place but turn a blind eye to it. The boss was like 'why do you even care, you dont drink with them." he didnt even let me answer before he realized what was happening.
>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.
Backstabbing, power structures that arent immediately obvious. But negativity is easier and especially effective when you just let bad politics win.
Trying to stay positive or out of politics is the right way.
>It just means decisions get made without you.
Yep. I'm finding myself in one of these right now. Im just staying out of it. Decisions are being made to punish me.
>Good politics is just being strategic about relationships and influence in the service of good outcomes.
This is what this AI article gets wrong. The 'bad politics' people think they are getting 'good outcomes' and if you play politics, you also think you're getting 'good outcomes' but how do you measure 'good'?
>They want a world where technical merit alone determines outcomes. That world doesn’t exist and never has.
Sure it does. This exists in the successful. Politics is what kills companies.
Let’s apply the same structure to another important area of human relations: marriage. “Don’t be in a bad marriage — here’s how a good marriage looks like”.
Sounds great as a writing exercise. Unclear how applicable it is in most of people’s real life circumstances.
A person can not “not be in politics”. You can only choose to have politics that affect you happen without your input. That’s how you end up with bad governments (in your mind).
The most important thing to learn about passivity is that it’s not a neutral position of exclusion. It is an active choice to not participate and be at the receiving end of the outcome.
gm678•4mo ago
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.
amarant•4mo ago
The whole reason I avoid politics is because it's not solution oriented. I don't get the feeling people discussing politics are trying to solve any problems, they're just fighting a tribal war, to have their tribe win over the other tribe(s).
Tribe cohesion seems to be valued waay higher than end results, and I'm a results-oriented person, so politics just isn't an attractive passtime to me. I also detest fighting/bickering, and I think it's not entirely unfair to describe politics as a bickering contest.
scarface_74•4mo ago
Your comment doesn’t address the article at all.
jitl•4mo ago
> feeling people discussing politics are trying to solve any problems
it's explicitly about how you need to work in political ways to solve problems at work. It's not about country-wide politics or something.
mindcrime•4mo ago
FWIW, the HN guidelines[1] specifically ask that we not do that.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
scarface_74•4mo ago
amarant•4mo ago
Yes it's also applicable to the other kind of politics. The two are entirely too similar imo.
All the more reason to steer clear if you ask me.
mlsu•4mo ago
You actually cannot be solution oriented without politics. If you are "not involved in politics," that means that politics is involved with you, and you'll be forced to go wherever it lands, instead of attempting to influence the outcome.
shadowgovt•4mo ago
(For software engineers in particular, who can trend towards wanting to think of themselves as little logic-machines divorced from that kind of behavior: I also think it's a good exercise to keep that stuff in-scope because we are not immune to our own humanity, and recognizing when others are being tribal and petty makes it easier to recognize it in ourselves.)
marcosdumay•4mo ago
The GP is right that people tend to name stuff as "politics" when there is no external goal. And getting involved on those is just bad.
But also, the GP is wrong if you go with the formal definition for that word, like you are doing.
the_other•4mo ago
teddyh•4mo ago
Just because you’re not a part of the prominent tribes that you see around you does not make you tribeless.
— […] and I have no culture of my own.
— Yes you do. You’re a culture of one. Which is no less valid that a culture of one billion.
— Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 6, episode 16, Birthright, Part I
suzdude•4mo ago
It depends on what you view a "discussing politics". To borrow a quote, "politics is the art of the possible." You have to use politics to define what problems are even considered, much less the possible ways they might get solved.
For instance, unlimited spending on political campaigns is either a problem, or not a problem, depending on your politics, never mind if it should be solved via amendment, court packing, or congressional act[1].
I agree, many people go hardcore on tribalism. I would likely agree it is a bad thing that many Americans define politics as, "us" and, "them". If you want to be results oriented, you have to convince people it's a problem, you're going to need to use politics to do so.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
Brian_K_White•4mo ago
bravetraveler•4mo ago
Brian_K_White•4mo ago
bravetraveler•4mo ago
Brian_K_White•4mo ago
bravetraveler•4mo ago
Not that it matters, but why did you choose to start proselytizing?
Brian_K_White•4mo ago
bravetraveler•4mo ago
I replied for much the same reason, calling bullshit. It doesn't mean anything.
Anyway, keep up the truly good work. I will admit you're a better human. I'm not beyond admitting selfishness, I just never claimed consistency.
Brian_K_White•4mo ago
bravetraveler•4mo ago
I might have fallen asleep if not for this thread; truly awake for too long. But there I go, overly participating again. Oops. Count this as your good deed for the day. Tribe remains whole, or something.
wat10000•4mo ago
Actual politics is 100% solution oriented. It's about getting other people to do what you want to achieve the outcome you want. Disagreements are about which outcomes are desired, or which actions will best achieve them.
Discussing politics is, at best, about saying what you wish other people would do.
bitwize•4mo ago
t0bia_s•4mo ago
- more focus of personal responsibility for my own actions, I do not belive that uknown electorate solve my problems
- open mind for those, who have different political view, I no longer see enemies and it gives mindset to have less biased conversations on various topics
- more time to education about alternative topics, creativity, building, care about family, etc.
dotgov•4mo ago