Don't Avoid Workplace Politics
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The article 'Stop Avoiding Politics' argues that workplace politics is inevitable and that engineers should engage with it to achieve their goals, sparking a discussion on the nature of politics in the workplace and how to navigate it effectively.
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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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
Not that it matters, but why did you choose to start proselytizing?
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.
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
Your comment doesn’t address the article at all.
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
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.
- 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.
It’s not a discussion of the toxic political environment we live in today.
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.
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.
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.
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
https://www.manager-tools.com/forums/deceit-and-murdering-un...
Amazon’s LP is “Disagree and Commit”
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.
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.
Did you tell here beforehand (earlier in relationship) you wanted a prenup, or only after proposal?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
You're arguing against a point they weren't making, I think
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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
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...
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
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 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.
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