"Think about the last time a terrible technical decision got pushed through at your company. Maybe it was adopting some overcomplicated architecture, or choosing a vendor that everyone knew was wrong, or killing a project that was actually working. I bet if you dig into what happened, you’ll find it wasn’t because the decision-makers were stupid. It’s because the people with the right information weren’t in the room."
Well, it's a decent article, but that paragraph does not match my experience. In my experience, it's typically because there's a non-technical reason why the technical decision was done badly:
1) devs, or their supervisors, or both want Hot New Thing on their resumes
2) in order to get Good New Thing purchased, the Old Bad Thing must be shown to be unworkable, so saving Old Bad Thing with a clever solution is undesirable
3) org needs a system using New Buzzword, to show to VC's or others, and this is the opportunity to use New Buzzword, whether it makes sense here or not
None of these are reasons that I like, but they are also reasons that are very convincing to most people, especially high-ranking decision makers.
I don't mean to suggest that the articles points like "Building relationships before you need them", etc. aren't a good idea. Just don't expect it to have a very high success rate in winning debates about "terrible technical decisions".
As usual HN comments are more on point than the article.
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.
I feel that a lot of the times conversations around this topic end up with some anecdote like "well, playing politics doesn't actually work because I work at a dysfunctional company where decisions are made by morons". If you have a C-suite that makes decisions based on golf games, this advice is not for you. You have a different set of problems. You should absolutely address those problems. But that doesn't mean that this advice isn't for anyone, and coming and telling everyone that the advice is always meaningless isn't accurate.
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.
Except this is an article on how to perform technical politics in large organizations. Functional, intelligent, non-nepotistic leadership is the exception, not the rule. It has been this way for a long time, perhaps forever. Dilbert became one of the most circulated comics for good reason. This article is the third guy.
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.
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.
So I think the question “should I involve myself in office politics?” is like asking “should I take up any hobby?” No, you need to choose a specific hobby first and then ask. Of course you should take up a hobby, but it matters more what hobby it is than the choosing whether or not to have a hobby.
> Pretending that identifying stakeholders' needs, communicating the solutions, and delivering them are the keys to succeeding in corporate politics is a joke.
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.
> Functional, intelligent, non-nepotistic leadership is the exception
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.
> 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.
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.
Survivorship bias. Get burned a bunch of times and see where your strategy lies. You'd be a fool to keep sinking all your effort into things that devastate your life time and again.
If I kept getting burned, I might think about the types of people I get into relationships with, the type of things I'm learning while dating, and I might talk with friends to see how their relationships are going and see if I could be doing something different. I don't think I would start telling everyone in a relationship to prepare for divorce.
> If you have a C-suite that makes decisions based on golf games, this advice is not for you. You have a different set of problems.
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.
If the C-suite makes decisions "based on golf games" then you need to learn how to play golf. You don't have to be good, but don't be so bad that you slow up the game. It is okay to be 1-2 over par every hole, but you need to nearly always find your ball and not hit too far into the rough. Take some lessons if needed. (there are swings that don't have as much power but are a lot easier to be accurate - perfect for you who doesn't want you win, you just want to be good enough to play the game). Then make sure you are on the list of people who will "complete your four-some" when anyone is looking for someone to play.
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.
Sorry to nitpick, and I know what you mean, but 1-2 under par on each hole you would be shooting ~45-55 which would basically be the best in the world :)
1-2 over par is shooting 90-100 which is much more achievable :)
Respecting and engaging with company politics in order to push good engineering decisions is one thing, but learning and playing a sport, I think falls outside of "other duties as assigned" for an engineer.
if you're one or two strokes under par for every hole you'll be invited because you're a world class player, or more likely you don't want to get invited because who wants to play with people who suck that bad?
I'd add that in my experience, when you are close to the action, the cynic "golfing nepotism" take is usually missing a point of view that is far more rational; just far from the developer/architect that is dismissing the decision. Perhaps not technically optimal, or fair, or even legal - but even so, more akin to "I know this person delivered in the past, and the alternative is also good on paper" or "I really need to save my ass" (nobody got fired by choosing IBM) or "business-wise, this technical recommendation I don't really care for". Perhaps I'm optimistic but in general I don't really think (or want to believe) that people are quick to wage their careers on an acquaintance that is clearly selling something as part of their job, unless the stakes are really not so high from their point of view. Then again, open a newspaper :)
> As usual HN comments are more on point than the article....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.
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.
> Not playing is not an option, and being obstinate is a good way to get fired.
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.
> 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.
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.
I would guess that most (?) decisions involving salespeople and the c-suite are relationship based. My entire industry runs more or less on personal relationships (commercial construction). In my case, virtually all of the work I sell is to people that trust me to deliver because I have repeatedly done so in the past. Every time I get a new customer I aim to build a relationship and deliver the best possible product I can so I get more work in the future, there’s always another guy with his foot jammed in the door waiting for you to fuck up and swoop in.
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.
I think the article is arguing that if you build the relationship, you can involve yourself into these conversations early enough to direct them the way that your idea would go. In your cases, for example:
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.
I think the article is great, in theory; it just NEVER works this way in practice, unless you may be in a technical organization. There are ALWAYS business reasons that cause technical projects to fail. We regularly see the articles about the failure rate of technical projects all the time on the front page.
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.
For the overwhelming majority of day-to-day, line-of-business software, the nerds are a commodity and the project succeeds or fails on how good or bad the business folks are. They should get the blame for the failures but also the credit for the successes.
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.
I appreciate you replying. My intent was never to place blame; instead, it was to point out that while the article's author suggests technical folks need to play the game better, I feel that it won't matter and getting the rest of a non-technical-first org along for the ride is more difficult than just being a solid political player.
Never works in practice is such a strong statement and I would argue that most of the time is because the technical people avoid politics entirely, like the article says
I dunno, honestly, my organization works a lot like what the post is describing. I think my org has healthy politics but at the same time I can't really tell if the times I thought the politics were "toxic" were simply because I was on the outside looking in, whereas this time I'm an operator in the space.
Engineers are always insufferable with this stuff. I can think of dozen times where everything was perfect, except for <thing we didn’t think of> or <thing we knew but didn’t bother to engage the customer on>.
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 mean sometimes you are outruled. That's part of recognizing politics, in my opinion. If your VCs want you to do GenAI and you think it's dumb, you are overruled. But you can still benefit from this in a lot of ways. You just need to recognize what you can benefit from.
Sure,though this stands in contrast to the author's thesis: "It’s the loud person who’s wrong getting their way because the quiet person who’s right won’t speak up."
> 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
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.
The thing is, from the point of view of getting investment money, it is probably the "right call". It's just not the business of making technology decisions, it's the business of making technology cosplay. Not my business.
As I heard once, in a large company VPs are rated by the number of reorgs they initiated per year. That explained so much insanity I have seen: a project gets moved to different directors, then after 5 reorgs ends up in its original place. Just large company things, VPs have to show "impact" where there is none.
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.
Agreed. In my experience, a lot of this has been the XY problem. C level has a legitimate need or problem, they think they've solved it by asking for technology Z and the people who actually know the systems aren't consulted. When they do push back, it's seen as not following orders, so now we have to shoehorn in some dumb solution that doesn't fit in with the rest of the env. It works, so leadership doesn't understand why it's a problem.
I as a self interested actor as we all are see nothing wrong with:
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.
Yes, recognizing reality and the incentive structure is powerful. Then one can make smart tradeoffs. Most people want to stay in apparent alignment with their employer to advance. But sometimes perfect alignment isn’t optimal for what you want to do next.
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.
Regarding #1, when people ask what is the best skill I acquired during my career, I always answer that it was "learning how to do well in interviews".
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
It depends on what type of interviews you expect. My value proposition hasn’t been my ability to write code for over a decade. It was first being the first or second technical hire by a then new director/manager/CTO brought in to lead a new initiative as a lead/architect and then working in customer facing cloud consulting roles combined with hands on keyboard coding.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
And even if it was because the right people weren't in the room, that's still a leadership failure. Part of the job of those decision-makers is to get the right people into the room
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.
> but none of it should feel like politics to your typical "I hate politics" engineer [...] Who doesn't like to share the cool stuff they've done?
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.
I know that plenty of people don't like doing presentations and writeups and such, but just telling your coworkers about whatever cool thing you've done seems to be pretty much universally enjoyed in my experience.
There's also option 4: CxO was out golfing with some rich friends that happen to own <vendor of buzzword software> and/or is getting kickbacks, so now we have to use <crap buzzword software> instead of <old solution> or just not using it at all because what the software offers isn't needed, but CxO doesn't know because he's out golfing, banging hookers and snorting coke all freaking day.
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.
the most common I've seen is "person in charge of Project That Makes No Sense is the most aggressive and willing to do deceitful things to make themselves look good"
When Jeff Hodges gave a presentation of his "Notes on Distributed Systems for Youngbloods"[1] at Lookout Mobile Security back in like 2014 or 2015, he did this really interesting aside at the end that changed my perception of my job, and it was basically this. You don't get to avoid "politics" in software, because building is collaborative, and all collaboration is political. You'll only hurt yourself by avoiding leveling up in soft skills.
No matter how correct or elegant your code is or how good your idea is, if you haven't built the relationships or put consideration into the broader social dynamic, you're much less likely to succeed.
I used to work for a software company that literally had "no politics" as part of its DNA. It was in the company handbook, it was in our values, people would say it when they talked about what it was like to work at the company. Hell, whilst I can't recall any specific instances, I guarantee that I said it and probably many times[0].
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.
Your Musashi quote reminds me of another relatively well-known quote from philosopher Eugene Gendlin:
"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."
There's some interesting meta futility in that statement. It's true of course, as far as it goes. But no one avoids truth because they think it's a rational strategy. They do it because it avoids emotional pain[0].
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.
> What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
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.
> 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.”
> 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 think the problem is that this is the core of most companies. A core lie that they tell the employees and sometimes even the customers - "we value you" - "we care about our employees" "we want to serve our shareholders" "we build community" "we try to ..." vision statement type stuff, almost always suborned to "I want the C suite to make the most money possible RIGHT NOW" or "You can never make me look bad even when I am an idiot".
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.
When has employment politics ever meant "leveling up in soft skills"?
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.
The way I see it is: "Office politics" means getting work done, making business decisions, and/or advancing your career using means other than technical or domain expertise. It could have a good or bad outcome, but it's still politics. The key attribute is that the outcome is achieved through some other method besides actually doing or directing the work.
> "Office politics" means getting work done, making business decisions, and/or advancing your career using means other than technical or domain expertise.
s/other than/in addition to/
That's the fundamental disagreement in this thread.
If that’s all you see, you probably need to level up your soft skills.
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.
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.
Many do. More common the further up the ladder you get. But I’ve been able to gain enough influence to affect most of the things I care about without engaging in that, unless you consider being friendly and supportive (something that did not come remotely naturally to me) to be brown-nosing.
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.
> 5. Being visible. If you do great work but nobody knows about it, did it really happen? Share your wins, present at all-hands, write those design docs that everyone will reference later.
And don't forget that when managers or seniors are involved, there's magic alchemy that comes from spreading the credit around. Suppose Bob works under Alice and Bob, mostly solely, accomplishes something significant. If Alice presents and takes credit for it, Alice might receive 1 credit point. If she presents it as Bob's work and never mentions herself, Bob will get the 1 credit point. But Alice will pick up some credit just for presenting (let's guess 0.5 unit), Bob will get the 1 point, and because Alice now manages Bob, whose stature just went up, she'll get an additional (let's guess) 0.25 point. So you've got 1.75 units of credit instead! Never be shy to give credit to others. You will benefit too!
That’s cool theory and all but in reality alice will get all the credit and no one will even remember bobs name. People are mostly wrapped up in their own thing and 2 months later at best they will remember one sentence and that it's somehow attached to alice. Get people doing the work on your team to present it if you want them to get credit or stop pretending you actually care about this
I've always used "we" when describing and presenting work done as part of a team, even if solo. There's a certain skill in knowing when to promote yourself, and how you do so. These days I tend to be positive in a group sense, and take direct specific ownership of failings. I may be lucky but I think this has led to a lot of respect from coworkers and c-suite that I've engaged with. I've never once felt like people don't know who is getting the work done in the end.
Everywhere I've worked, come annual review time, everyone is supposed to emphasize what they did, not what the team did. "We're considering promoting you, not the team, so tell us what you did!" Same with interviews: You're not supposed to say "I was a key contributor of Team X that shipped Product Y." You're supposed to say "I shipped Product Y."
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.
In these situations I will frame my contributions directly without the "we" part, speaking to how I contributed to a particular team output, or if it was 100%, I'll just say as much. My comment was in terms of general talk to stakeholders / presentations / casual conversations - then I default to "we".
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.
You don’t get promoted in any well functioning organization until you operate at the level you want to be promoted to.
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.
> Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either above humanity, or below it; he is the ‘Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,’ whom Homera denounces — the outcast who is a lover of war; he may be compared to a bird which flies alone.
Sure, Aristotle wasn't talking about corporations, but as the author says "you can refuse to participate, but that doesn’t make it go away," you shouldn't be a bird which flies alone.
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.
The counterpoint to this is that in order to motivate large groups of people to get stuff done, you need to be 'involved.' A good leader cannot be someone who says "we're above all of this" -- they have to be involved, they have to influence, and they use their influence to productive ends.
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.
It turns out in the end, we are solving problems for real people, and so all the messiness of real people: the pettiness, the tribal nature, the bickering, the facts-bent-to-justify-feelings... That's in the problem domain.
(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.)
> I don't get the feeling people discussing politics are trying to solve any problems
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.
Politics and discussing politics are pretty much unrelated things.
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.
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".
We can go by the guidelines or we can look at reality. It’s blindingly obvious that he in fact did not read the article and based everything he said on the title
tribelessness itself is a poor result and does not solve any problems. It's a dead end. It's irrelevance. It's being an animal that eats for a while then dies and does no one else any good in the mean time. By arranging things so that no one else is a part of you, you are also not a part of anyone else. What is the point of that existense? It's the same as living in a vr where all you do is self-gratify and it has no effect on the world.
- 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.
There is a word in German: "vogelfrei". It means "free as a bird". Sounds romantic, but what it actually means is that the person who is free as a bird does not enjoy the protections of the law and hence there are no repercussions for killing them.
This is not a great take. Politics shows up as a failure to construct an aligned organization.
There will always be some politics, but it should not be the most significant thing going on at a company.
In a well designed org, it tends towards zero.
In a positive sum environment, with incentives aligned with the shareholders, everyone is trying to make the business more profitable, and the "more" that everyone wants comes from the market.
You have to contend with reality on reality's terms to get more.
In a zero-sum environment (which is most large corporations) nothing anyone does will meaningfully move the needle on profitability.
The business has been built, and now it is coasting.
How to divide up the predictable profits is decided by politics, the "more" comes from someone else within the organization getting less.
The best advice is to know which environment you are in.
The "right" move is entirely context dependent.
If you are in a zero-sum environment, you need to play politics, that's the game.
If you are in a positive-sum environment, politics will be the noise, you can get more by building more.
It's bad advice. Office politics is toxic, no matter how you slice it. It's the one thing I'd urge anyone that wants to focus on the best parts of a career to avoid at all costs. It brings out the worst qualities in people (tribalism, favoritism, gossip).
I think you are missing the game theory aspect of it. Even in the positive sum game the spoils aren’t divided equally. Additionally not everyone behaves rationally, i find the opposite to be generally true
> I think you are missing the game theory aspect of it.
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.
I really don't see how your reply made a new point. What the other person was responding to was that even if you were to construct your positive sum game, you will have politics because reward distributions are not equal. The very fact that some people receive bigger bonuses, RSUs or promotions and others don't is an unequal distribution such that politics will be there.
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.
Everything has a sales component, good engineering doesn't automatically sell itself. In that respect, I agree some of what's called politics here is always necessary.
On the other hand, I've worked at places where the only way to get ahead is to be a smarmy political operator and do no real work (I find this common when there is no exposure to a real market so no objective standard of what is the right direction to take). It's better to just leave such organizations.
This is an excellent read and the title definitely made me assume the author wasn't talking about "office politics".
What's more important than "politics" is your ability to communicate in terms that people making decisions will understand. I didn't get this nuance early in my career. I was always focused on shipping, oblivious to costs: Time Cost, Opportunity Cost, etc.
Learning to make technical decisions based on Return on Investment is the real key to bridging this communications divide.
Weighted Shorted Job First (WSJF) is an approach that will bring your team and organization into thinking that way. It works wonders for getting people on the same page and it's just an ROI formula.
WSJF = Cost of Delay / Job Size
Job Size is a proxy for cost, because it's a proxy for time...which costs money.
Cost of Delay is a fancy way of estimating how valuable something is. Technically it's "User Business Value + Time Criticality + Opportunity Enablement & Risk Reduction" but it really boils down to Value + Time Criticality. Time Criticality meaning real deadlines where the value will go away if we don't hit it by the deadline. Think conference dates or contractual obligations, not sprint commitments (wanting something sooner doesn't make it time critical).
The more prepared you are, the better the case you can make for this number while those who are unprepared will simply have to guess without anything to substantiate it.
I got deep into this philosophy after watching an exec waste resources for over a year and a half on a project that nobody wanted. When we started scrutinizing decisions with WSJF and nothing he wanted to ranked highly enough based on the math, the entire organization got better. It does wonders to eliminate the squeaky wheel problem too.
> What's more important than "politics" is your ability to communicate in terms that people making decisions will understand.
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.
This is what I always try to emphasize to the junior guys I've worked with. I read the book Flowers for Algernon when I was younger and it was the thing that stood out to me the most.
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.
1 office politics tip for engineers: engineers are helpful people, people who believe in putting in hard work now because future benefits.
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.
I don't think this is "politics" but even if it technically is, the term has such negative connotations that I think we're better off approaching the scenarios from a different angle, rather than trying to rescue "politics". Start by telling yourself "I will assume the best in motivations and most charitable interpretation." Now approach the "Why?" like a cultural anthropologist: How did we get here? What clues can I find that explain the current state? What artifacts are out there? How is communication organized? What's the hierarchy structure? Who or what are notable influences? Talk to lots of people. Ask lots of open questions. Listen. Sketch literal and conceptual diagrams of "how this all works".
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.
On some level this is just a technicality. When people talk about politics they almost always talk about bad politics because good politics doesn’t feel like politics. It just feels like things are working correctly.
It is a technicality, but an important one IMO, because using bad terminology causes unnecessary confusion. I would definitely say that most of what the article describes as "good politics" is not politics at all, but more like just the soft skills part of a normal engineering job.
"Think about the last time a terrible technical decision got pushed through at your company. Maybe it was adopting some overcomplicated architecture, or choosing a vendor that everyone knew was wrong, or killing a project that was actually working. I bet if you dig into what happened, you’ll find it wasn’t because the decision-makers were stupid. It’s because the people with the right information weren’t in the room."
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."
I find being outspoken is a great way to be heard and visible, but if I'm being honest my entire personality is confrontational.
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.
I think the problem here is the implication of the term "politics". We've been conditioned (at least in the US) to think of politics as a tribalistic "us vs. them" activity where interactions have winners and losers.
The classic picture of "office politics" is about either damaging reputations with gossip or getting special treatment because of who you know instead of what you know.
But this depiction strikes me as less about that dirty version of politics and more about simply accepting that social grease is important in an organization. Teamwork is important. Crafting the message to the recipient is important. Inclusiveness and a shared sense of ownership is important. Culture is important.
I detest and refuse to engage in tribalism - workplace or otherwise. But I 100% believe in the stuff from the previous paragraph.
Yeah, this article says things like "understand the big picture" and "keep higher-ups informed about what's really important" and claims this is "good politics." No, that's probably just part of your job. Are there really people out there saying not to do these things? I'm left with the impression that the article is arguing against a straw man, because there is definitely something called workplace politics that engineers (rightly) try to avoid, but it's not what the article seems to be describing.
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.
It turns out that that the degree to which you can avoid politics is proportional to the number of other people involved. You can probably safely ignore international politics: there are around 8 billion other people involved in it, and unless you are prepared to devote most of your time to it, you probably aren't going to move any needles anywhere.
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 would say, toxic politics is also just the bad politics the OP is talking about. Basically by the definition of the OP, I think pretty much most populism qualifies as bad politics. Politics beyond the workplace can work very similar to the one within. I know people who did 'good politics' within their work context and were asked to actual enter local politics. IMHO this is the best case. While I guess we also need career politicians, I see the biggest value in people that enter politics at a later stage.
To me, "populism" in the workplace shows up as pitting two groups against each other for personal gain.
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.
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.
The HN title "what good workplace politics looks like in practice" is less clear than the article's actual title (and, the article's actual point), "Stop avoiding politics"
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.
> I bet if you dig into what happened, you’ll find it wasn’t because the decision-makers were stupid. It’s because the people with the right information weren’t in the room.
Or, the people with the decision making power just had a different opinion made a decision irrespective of "right information"
> Politics is just how humans coordinate in groups.
"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.
Beware of corporate cultures that encourage employee/teammate feedback and provide mechanisms for collecting it anonymously (often a function of HR software).
Anonymous feedback is almost always destructive, the exception being when the leaders of large organizations seek employee sentiment.
"Politics is just how humans coordinate in groups. It’s the invisible network of relationships, influence, and informal power that exists in every organization. You can refuse to participate, but that doesn’t make it go away. It just means decisions get made without you."
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.
Politics here is collaboration. Example given on tool selection seems like lacked good engineering and oversight in terms of trade studies or boards found in larger orgs.
All life is politics, and workspaces are not politics exempt. The world we live in understandably makes many cynics. Yes, still we want no kings, and more politics in and out of our workspaces.
> Now I think the opposite: politics isn’t the problem; bad politics is. And pretending politics doesn’t exist? That’s how bad politics wins.
Feels like that's how extremism wins? If no one wants to confront other's political ideas, out of fear irrational responses,
At least in the United States, Americans are more unified on issues than the current executive branch, or (at the very least) the largest main stream media outlet would have you believe. It'd be great if people worked at the center, dealing with outcomes. There's far too much talking past each other, as people stand on their mountain of comfortable points, far too many who ignore evidence as soon as it does not conform to their world view.
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.
And you get absolutely nowhere besides being a mid level developer if you avoid office politics. I don’t care what your title is, if you are just heads down pulling tickets off the board, you are a mid level developer according to every leveling guideline I’ve seen by companies that have one - including BigTech.
After that it’s about “scope” and “impact”. You can’t have either without managing up, down and horizontally.
There's no way to avoid politics to avoid getting fired, it just means that when you get laid off you picked the wrong thing, and basically did it incidentally because you refused to forecast what project was going to be culled. Most software projects fail, and working harder on a failure won't get you anywhere.
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.
> Good politics is just being strategic about relationships and influence in the service of good outcomes.
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.
This, this, this, but with a few caveats I’ve learned for myself (both government politics and corporate politics):
* Politics in a derogatory sense is simply bad governance. It’s bad ideas leading to bad decisions, often supported by bad data or bad justifications. In government, that “bad” might be a shade of “-ism” (corporatism, fascism, authoritarianism, racism, sexism, etc), while in corporate realms it’s often either straight dicta from the executive team or manipulative malfeasance from bad actors further down the chain
* Good politics and good governance are indistinguishable from one another, by and large.
* If consensus is reached by those acting in the best interests of the organization in the long haul, everyone involved should feel fairly invigorated afterwards. That rush is what gets folks into politics more broadly, and is how movements grow
* Cooperation, historically, breeds more success than mere competition. Bad actors wielding politics as a cudgel generally try to deter others from participating because they desire competition as a means of preventing others from achieving success.
* Politics isn’t necessarily deceitful, as the OP gets into. It’s about building relationships and understanding goals, then acting collaboratively to achieve them.
* “Politics-free zones” only serve to enable the bad actors in a space, who use that label to advance their (often indefensible) ideals and clamp down on dissent.
A lot of us in tech need to do better with politics if we want technology to change the world for the better, instead of merely serve the whims of billionaire griftos or regimes hostile to human rights.
Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but I remember that there used to be times when slop like this (and some other similar stop I've recently seen getting posted in here) was just not a thing, at least not at this level. I mean, this is really sloppy, it doesn't mean anything and a lot of things at the same time, it doesn't mention anything concrete.
> 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.
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.
> Stop pretending you’re above politics. You’re not. Nobody is. The only question is whether you’ll get good at it or keep losing to people who already are.
False. You do not lose if you do not play. You can offer your expertise/opinions and point out places where things could be improved, but at the end of the day, just treat work as someone paying for your time. If you've advised them on how to best make use of that time, and they want to do something else, well it's their money.
it depends on whether you want to live life with work-as-someone-paying-for-your-time or whether you want to live life as work-as-perfecting-and-delivering-on-craft
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
If I need to dig into social engineering and extrovert masking to be an effective engineer I probably should also look for another job. I hate places where this borderline nepotism is the only way to get anything done.
Oh well, I'll just endure it until the job market relaxes a little.
You can hone your skills while still maintaining a healthy detachment. You make your case at a thing, business decides to do something else that you think is dumb. You only "lose" if you were overly attached to the decision in the first place. Otherwise you simply get a chance to observe the outcome, see what went well/poorly, and reflect on whether/how you were totally right all along. Next time you have a clearer understanding and perhaps will be able to better articulate your position. You didn't lose. You gained experience and wisdom. You always win as long as you're open to do so. The business lost by listening to the wrong person.
And, indeed, perfection of the craft involves politics: it's not just understanding the technical space, it's about, eventually, understanding why other people see that space differently, what their goals are, how those goals overlap or don't, and how technical choices feed into that social layer.
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.
I think this is saying the same thing as the author, with the possible exception that the author is operating under the assumption that curtailing one's career at a particular level is "losing." It isn't for everyone, and it's a perfectly rational decision to top out as a really good individual contributor or senior software engineer.
... 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.
I have never seen a company with leveling guidelines consider a “senior engineer” as someone who dutifully just pulls tickets off the board and doesn’t have to lead major initiatives that involve dealing with other people.
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.
While I agree that avoiding/ignoring politics isn't helpful to anyone, it still doesn't have a place at work. My view is, people are going to disagree on politics, and therefore it just gets into a debate, or worse, an agrument at the office or in chat and makes the whole situation more ugly than the manager and/or employer wants to have to deal with.
The author presents two options: think you’re above politics, or practice it. I admit that, when I was younger, I did believe the first for a while, but what it progressed to was an option C: accept that politics, in some form, is necessary and affects me, then choose to spend as much of my life as possible on other things. If politics is necessary then boy is farming necessary, yet I’m not a farmer. Medicine is necessary, yet I’m not a doctor; defense is necessary, yet I’m not a soldier. These jobs are entrusted to others. We live in a highly specialized society, with which comes the gift of being free to choose beautiful things to feed our limited life energy to, and the curse of being ineffectual in any area we sacrifice little for. Because we’ll be consistently outperformed by those who give more to that area, and less to every other endeavor and principle.
Sometimes, in both workplaces and countries, we enter a state in which we’re forced to feed more of ourselves to the beast. The state’s name is desperation. It’s a tragic state, like reversion to a society in which we spend all our time finding food. People in such a state can’t create science or art.
"Think about the last time a terrible technical decision got pushed through at your company. Maybe it was adopting some overcomplicated architecture, or choosing a vendor that everyone knew was wrong, or killing a project that was actually working. I bet if you dig into what happened, you’ll find it wasn’t because the decision-makers were stupid. It’s because the people with the right information weren’t in the room."
Well, it's a decent article, but that paragraph does not match my experience. In my experience, it's typically because there's a non-technical reason why the technical decision was done badly:
1) devs, or their supervisors, or both want Hot New Thing on their resumes
2) in order to get Good New Thing purchased, the Old Bad Thing must be shown to be unworkable, so saving Old Bad Thing with a clever solution is undesirable
3) org needs a system using New Buzzword, to show to VC's or others, and this is the opportunity to use New Buzzword, whether it makes sense here or not
None of these are reasons that I like, but they are also reasons that are very convincing to most people, especially high-ranking decision makers.
I don't mean to suggest that the articles points like "Building relationships before you need them", etc. aren't a good idea. Just don't expect it to have a very high success rate in winning debates about "terrible technical decisions".
As usual HN comments are more on point than the article.
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.
I feel that a lot of the times conversations around this topic end up with some anecdote like "well, playing politics doesn't actually work because I work at a dysfunctional company where decisions are made by morons". If you have a C-suite that makes decisions based on golf games, this advice is not for you. You have a different set of problems. You should absolutely address those problems. But that doesn't mean that this advice isn't for anyone, and coming and telling everyone that the advice is always meaningless isn't accurate.
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.
Except this is an article on how to perform technical politics in large organizations. Functional, intelligent, non-nepotistic leadership is the exception, not the rule. It has been this way for a long time, perhaps forever. Dilbert became one of the most circulated comics for good reason. This article is the third guy.
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.
I think these discussions always miss a nuance.
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.
So I think the question “should I involve myself in office politics?” is like asking “should I take up any hobby?” No, you need to choose a specific hobby first and then ask. Of course you should take up a hobby, but it matters more what hobby it is than the choosing whether or not to have a hobby.
> Pretending that identifying stakeholders' needs, communicating the solutions, and delivering them are the keys to succeeding in corporate politics is a joke.
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.
> Functional, intelligent, non-nepotistic leadership is the exception
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.
> 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.
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.
Survivorship bias. Get burned a bunch of times and see where your strategy lies. You'd be a fool to keep sinking all your effort into things that devastate your life time and again.
If I kept getting burned, I might think about the types of people I get into relationships with, the type of things I'm learning while dating, and I might talk with friends to see how their relationships are going and see if I could be doing something different. I don't think I would start telling everyone in a relationship to prepare for divorce.
People change; especially over decades.
Do factor in that people in a healthy marriage don't have a lot of marriages.
For first-time marriages, the number is still quite high (~40%)
> If you have a C-suite that makes decisions based on golf games, this advice is not for you. You have a different set of problems.
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.
If the C-suite makes decisions "based on golf games" then you need to learn how to play golf. You don't have to be good, but don't be so bad that you slow up the game. It is okay to be 1-2 over par every hole, but you need to nearly always find your ball and not hit too far into the rough. Take some lessons if needed. (there are swings that don't have as much power but are a lot easier to be accurate - perfect for you who doesn't want you win, you just want to be good enough to play the game). Then make sure you are on the list of people who will "complete your four-some" when anyone is looking for someone to play.
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...
Sorry to nitpick, and I know what you mean, but 1-2 under par on each hole you would be shooting ~45-55 which would basically be the best in the world :)
1-2 over par is shooting 90-100 which is much more achievable :)
Thanks, fixed that.
Respecting and engaging with company politics in order to push good engineering decisions is one thing, but learning and playing a sport, I think falls outside of "other duties as assigned" for an engineer.
Also how do you get invited? When the invitee is specifically inviting the CEO without you to circumvent your influence?
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.
You don't play with the ceo normally, but you play with others who play with the ceo (might be another level).
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.
if you're one or two strokes under par for every hole you'll be invited because you're a world class player, or more likely you don't want to get invited because who wants to play with people who suck that bad?
I'd add that in my experience, when you are close to the action, the cynic "golfing nepotism" take is usually missing a point of view that is far more rational; just far from the developer/architect that is dismissing the decision. Perhaps not technically optimal, or fair, or even legal - but even so, more akin to "I know this person delivered in the past, and the alternative is also good on paper" or "I really need to save my ass" (nobody got fired by choosing IBM) or "business-wise, this technical recommendation I don't really care for". Perhaps I'm optimistic but in general I don't really think (or want to believe) that people are quick to wage their careers on an acquaintance that is clearly selling something as part of their job, unless the stakes are really not so high from their point of view. Then again, open a newspaper :)
This is just one example that was made public due to the federal case, but there is no doubt that this kind of activity is quite common in corporate America at all levels. https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executiv...
A solid understanding of behavioral psychology may make it obvious, but like you mention, one could also just open a newspaper.
> Then the C-suite overrode the process decisions basically because they played golf with someone outside the company.
Every Oracle adoption for the past 40 years
And 100% of TikTok and Paramount information control acquisitions.
The golfist outside the company played the political game better than the people inside the company.
> As usual HN comments are more on point than the article....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.
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.
> Not playing is not an option, and being obstinate is a good way to get fired.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's always golf... or something much more NSFW....
I would guess that most (?) decisions involving salespeople and the c-suite are relationship based. My entire industry runs more or less on personal relationships (commercial construction). In my case, virtually all of the work I sell is to people that trust me to deliver because I have repeatedly done so in the past. Every time I get a new customer I aim to build a relationship and deliver the best possible product I can so I get more work in the future, there’s always another guy with his foot jammed in the door waiting for you to fuck up and swoop in.
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.
I think the article is arguing that if you build the relationship, you can involve yourself into these conversations early enough to direct them the way that your idea would go. In your cases, for example:
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.
I think the article is great, in theory; it just NEVER works this way in practice, unless you may be in a technical organization. There are ALWAYS business reasons that cause technical projects to fail. We regularly see the articles about the failure rate of technical projects all the time on the front page.
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.
> There are ALWAYS business reasons that cause technical projects to 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 overwhelming majority of day-to-day, line-of-business software, the nerds are a commodity and the project succeeds or fails on how good or bad the business folks are. They should get the blame for the failures but also the credit for the successes.
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.
I appreciate you replying. My intent was never to place blame; instead, it was to point out that while the article's author suggests technical folks need to play the game better, I feel that it won't matter and getting the rest of a non-technical-first org along for the ride is more difficult than just being a solid political player.
The article's point is that "the rest of a non-technical-first org along for the ride" is indeed playing politics (or at least a subset thereof).
Never works in practice is such a strong statement and I would argue that most of the time is because the technical people avoid politics entirely, like the article says
I dunno, honestly, my organization works a lot like what the post is describing. I think my org has healthy politics but at the same time I can't really tell if the times I thought the politics were "toxic" were simply because I was on the outside looking in, whereas this time I'm an operator in the space.
Engineers are always insufferable with this stuff. I can think of dozen times where everything was perfect, except for <thing we didn’t think of> or <thing we knew but didn’t bother to engage the customer on>.
There’s a million reasons why projects fail, but astute engineering mangers who are able to understand what the business really needs are invaluable.
What about RTO? New 'ai-first' genai initiatives?
I mean sometimes you are outruled. That's part of recognizing politics, in my opinion. If your VCs want you to do GenAI and you think it's dumb, you are overruled. But you can still benefit from this in a lot of ways. You just need to recognize what you can benefit from.
Sure,though this stands in contrast to the author's thesis: "It’s the loud person who’s wrong getting their way because the quiet person who’s right won’t speak up."
> 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
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.
I am sure you could have came up with a legit use case for AI
The thing is, from the point of view of getting investment money, it is probably the "right call". It's just not the business of making technology decisions, it's the business of making technology cosplay. Not my business.
C-suite only get credit for changes, so they are incentivized to make changes at random and hope some of them turn out to look good in hindsight.
As I heard once, in a large company VPs are rated by the number of reorgs they initiated per year. That explained so much insanity I have seen: a project gets moved to different directors, then after 5 reorgs ends up in its original place. Just large company things, VPs have to show "impact" where there is none.
> "terrible technical decisions".
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.
Agreed. In my experience, a lot of this has been the XY problem. C level has a legitimate need or problem, they think they've solved it by asking for technology Z and the people who actually know the systems aren't consulted. When they do push back, it's seen as not following orders, so now we have to shoehorn in some dumb solution that doesn't fit in with the rest of the env. It works, so leadership doesn't understand why it's a problem.
I as a self interested actor as we all are see nothing wrong with:
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.
Yes, recognizing reality and the incentive structure is powerful. Then one can make smart tradeoffs. Most people want to stay in apparent alignment with their employer to advance. But sometimes perfect alignment isn’t optimal for what you want to do next.
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.
Regarding #1, when people ask what is the best skill I acquired during my career, I always answer that it was "learning how to do well in interviews".
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
It depends on what type of interviews you expect. My value proposition hasn’t been my ability to write code for over a decade. It was first being the first or second technical hire by a then new director/manager/CTO brought in to lead a new initiative as a lead/architect and then working in customer facing cloud consulting roles combined with hands on keyboard coding.
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.
> 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.
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.
This guy businesses.
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.
And even if it was because the right people weren't in the room, that's still a leadership failure. Part of the job of those decision-makers is to get the right people into the room
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.
> but none of it should feel like politics to your typical "I hate politics" engineer [...] Who doesn't like to share the cool stuff they've done?
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.
I know that plenty of people don't like doing presentations and writeups and such, but just telling your coworkers about whatever cool thing you've done seems to be pretty much universally enjoyed in my experience.
There's also option 4: CxO was out golfing with some rich friends that happen to own <vendor of buzzword software> and/or is getting kickbacks, so now we have to use <crap buzzword software> instead of <old solution> or just not using it at all because what the software offers isn't needed, but CxO doesn't know because he's out golfing, banging hookers and snorting coke all freaking day.
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...
the most common I've seen is "person in charge of Project That Makes No Sense is the most aggressive and willing to do deceitful things to make themselves look good"
When Jeff Hodges gave a presentation of his "Notes on Distributed Systems for Youngbloods"[1] at Lookout Mobile Security back in like 2014 or 2015, he did this really interesting aside at the end that changed my perception of my job, and it was basically this. You don't get to avoid "politics" in software, because building is collaborative, and all collaboration is political. You'll only hurt yourself by avoiding leveling up in soft skills.
No matter how correct or elegant your code is or how good your idea is, if you haven't built the relationships or put consideration into the broader social dynamic, you're much less likely to succeed.
[1] https://www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distrib...
I used to work for a software company that literally had "no politics" as part of its DNA. It was in the company handbook, it was in our values, people would say it when they talked about what it was like to work at the company. Hell, whilst I can't recall any specific instances, I guarantee that I said it and probably many times[0].
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.
Your Musashi quote reminds me of another relatively well-known quote from philosopher Eugene Gendlin:
"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."
There's some interesting meta futility in that statement. It's true of course, as far as it goes. But no one avoids truth because they think it's a rational strategy. They do it because it avoids emotional pain[0].
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.
> What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
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.
> 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.”
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.
Thanks: that's interesting to know.
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 think the problem is that this is the core of most companies. A core lie that they tell the employees and sometimes even the customers - "we value you" - "we care about our employees" "we want to serve our shareholders" "we build community" "we try to ..." vision statement type stuff, almost always suborned to "I want the C suite to make the most money possible RIGHT NOW" or "You can never make me look bad even when I am an idiot".
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.
When has employment politics ever meant "leveling up in soft skills"?
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".
I agree with your description of "politics" as a negative/pejorative thing. That's also the only way I'm used to hearing it.
Hearing about "politics" in a neutral/positive way would be new to me.
> I agree with your description of "politics" as a negative/pejorative thing.
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!"
The way I see it is: "Office politics" means getting work done, making business decisions, and/or advancing your career using means other than technical or domain expertise. It could have a good or bad outcome, but it's still politics. The key attribute is that the outcome is achieved through some other method besides actually doing or directing the work.
> "Office politics" means getting work done, making business decisions, and/or advancing your career using means other than technical or domain expertise.
s/other than/in addition to/
That's the fundamental disagreement in this thread.
I think that's a very valid take, actually.
If that’s all you see, you probably need to level up your soft skills.
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.
> If that’s all you see, you probably need to level up your soft skills.
Not OP but I honestly don't see how this comment/tone is warranted in response to what they wrote.
You have yet to meet someone at a company you work for you who does one or more of the things I listed above to successfully advance their career?
I don't think that's their point.
I think their point is that you can have influence without doing these things.
Then I was misunderstood as well.
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.
I think you were misunderstood as well, yes.
Many do. More common the further up the ladder you get. But I’ve been able to gain enough influence to affect most of the things I care about without engaging in that, unless you consider being friendly and supportive (something that did not come remotely naturally to me) to be brown-nosing.
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.
And what, you think those are technical skills?
My point is that framing "bad politics" as a problem with you, or your employees if you're an employer, is absurd.
"Bad politics" comes straight from the top.
This is frankly a very childish and Reddit-level take on the issue.
If you think HN is a bastion of "adultish takes", you're gonna have a bad time.
> 5. Being visible. If you do great work but nobody knows about it, did it really happen? Share your wins, present at all-hands, write those design docs that everyone will reference later.
And don't forget that when managers or seniors are involved, there's magic alchemy that comes from spreading the credit around. Suppose Bob works under Alice and Bob, mostly solely, accomplishes something significant. If Alice presents and takes credit for it, Alice might receive 1 credit point. If she presents it as Bob's work and never mentions herself, Bob will get the 1 credit point. But Alice will pick up some credit just for presenting (let's guess 0.5 unit), Bob will get the 1 point, and because Alice now manages Bob, whose stature just went up, she'll get an additional (let's guess) 0.25 point. So you've got 1.75 units of credit instead! Never be shy to give credit to others. You will benefit too!
(This is also one of the 11 Laws of Showrunning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27867023 among other links )
That’s cool theory and all but in reality alice will get all the credit and no one will even remember bobs name. People are mostly wrapped up in their own thing and 2 months later at best they will remember one sentence and that it's somehow attached to alice. Get people doing the work on your team to present it if you want them to get credit or stop pretending you actually care about this
I've always used "we" when describing and presenting work done as part of a team, even if solo. There's a certain skill in knowing when to promote yourself, and how you do so. These days I tend to be positive in a group sense, and take direct specific ownership of failings. I may be lucky but I think this has led to a lot of respect from coworkers and c-suite that I've engaged with. I've never once felt like people don't know who is getting the work done in the end.
Everywhere I've worked, come annual review time, everyone is supposed to emphasize what they did, not what the team did. "We're considering promoting you, not the team, so tell us what you did!" Same with interviews: You're not supposed to say "I was a key contributor of Team X that shipped Product Y." You're supposed to say "I shipped Product Y."
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.
In these situations I will frame my contributions directly without the "we" part, speaking to how I contributed to a particular team output, or if it was 100%, I'll just say as much. My comment was in terms of general talk to stakeholders / presentations / casual conversations - then I default to "we".
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.
You don’t get promoted in any well functioning organization until you operate at the level you want to be promoted to.
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.
anecdote:
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
This is one effect that a lot of narcissists don't understand: You get more by giving some away.
So you can get only get to the top when you spread coins around.
With the number of narcissists I've seen be wildly successful, I have to disagree with you.
There is a very clear and well established path to the top for people who only care about themselves.
> Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either above humanity, or below it; he is the ‘Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,’ whom Homera denounces — the outcast who is a lover of war; he may be compared to a bird which flies alone.
Sure, Aristotle wasn't talking about corporations, but as the author says "you can refuse to participate, but that doesn’t make it go away," you shouldn't be a bird which flies alone.
Tribeless suits me just fine.
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.
The counterpoint to this is that in order to motivate large groups of people to get stuff done, you need to be 'involved.' A good leader cannot be someone who says "we're above all of this" -- they have to be involved, they have to influence, and they use their influence to productive ends.
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 problem is way more "involved in what exactly?" than whether people should be involved or not.
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.
It turns out in the end, we are solving problems for real people, and so all the messiness of real people: the pettiness, the tribal nature, the bickering, the facts-bent-to-justify-feelings... That's in the problem domain.
(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.)
> I don't get the feeling people discussing politics are trying to solve any problems
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
> Tribeless suits me just fine.
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
Politics and discussing politics are pretty much unrelated things.
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.
Did you read the article?
> 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.
I actually was thinking specifically about the office politics at one of my previous employers when I wrote that comment.
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.
> Did you read the article?
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
We can go by the guidelines or we can look at reality. It’s blindingly obvious that he in fact did not read the article and based everything he said on the title
tribelessness itself is a poor result and does not solve any problems. It's a dead end. It's irrelevance. It's being an animal that eats for a while then dies and does no one else any good in the mean time. By arranging things so that no one else is a part of you, you are also not a part of anyone else. What is the point of that existense? It's the same as living in a vr where all you do is self-gratify and it has no effect on the world.
Sounds fun, I'm in. Didn't ask for the ride/responsibility and the only reason it hasn't ended by now is sheer cowardice
You realize the article is about “politics” in the workplace or more accurately learning how to deal with people and getting your ideas across?
Your comment doesn’t address the article at all.
Abandoning care about current politics gives me:
- 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.
There is a word in German: "vogelfrei". It means "free as a bird". Sounds romantic, but what it actually means is that the person who is free as a bird does not enjoy the protections of the law and hence there are no repercussions for killing them.
You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.
This is not a great take. Politics shows up as a failure to construct an aligned organization. There will always be some politics, but it should not be the most significant thing going on at a company. In a well designed org, it tends towards zero.
In a positive sum environment, with incentives aligned with the shareholders, everyone is trying to make the business more profitable, and the "more" that everyone wants comes from the market. You have to contend with reality on reality's terms to get more.
In a zero-sum environment (which is most large corporations) nothing anyone does will meaningfully move the needle on profitability. The business has been built, and now it is coasting. How to divide up the predictable profits is decided by politics, the "more" comes from someone else within the organization getting less.
The best advice is to know which environment you are in. The "right" move is entirely context dependent. If you are in a zero-sum environment, you need to play politics, that's the game. If you are in a positive-sum environment, politics will be the noise, you can get more by building more.
It's bad advice. Office politics is toxic, no matter how you slice it. It's the one thing I'd urge anyone that wants to focus on the best parts of a career to avoid at all costs. It brings out the worst qualities in people (tribalism, favoritism, gossip).
I think you are missing the game theory aspect of it. Even in the positive sum game the spoils aren’t divided equally. Additionally not everyone behaves rationally, i find the opposite to be generally true
> I think you are missing the game theory aspect of it.
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.
I really don't see how your reply made a new point. What the other person was responding to was that even if you were to construct your positive sum game, you will have politics because reward distributions are not equal. The very fact that some people receive bigger bonuses, RSUs or promotions and others don't is an unequal distribution such that politics will be there.
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.
Everything has a sales component, good engineering doesn't automatically sell itself. In that respect, I agree some of what's called politics here is always necessary.
On the other hand, I've worked at places where the only way to get ahead is to be a smarmy political operator and do no real work (I find this common when there is no exposure to a real market so no objective standard of what is the right direction to take). It's better to just leave such organizations.
This is an excellent read and the title definitely made me assume the author wasn't talking about "office politics".
What's more important than "politics" is your ability to communicate in terms that people making decisions will understand. I didn't get this nuance early in my career. I was always focused on shipping, oblivious to costs: Time Cost, Opportunity Cost, etc.
Learning to make technical decisions based on Return on Investment is the real key to bridging this communications divide.
Weighted Shorted Job First (WSJF) is an approach that will bring your team and organization into thinking that way. It works wonders for getting people on the same page and it's just an ROI formula.
WSJF = Cost of Delay / Job Size
Job Size is a proxy for cost, because it's a proxy for time...which costs money.
Cost of Delay is a fancy way of estimating how valuable something is. Technically it's "User Business Value + Time Criticality + Opportunity Enablement & Risk Reduction" but it really boils down to Value + Time Criticality. Time Criticality meaning real deadlines where the value will go away if we don't hit it by the deadline. Think conference dates or contractual obligations, not sprint commitments (wanting something sooner doesn't make it time critical).
The more prepared you are, the better the case you can make for this number while those who are unprepared will simply have to guess without anything to substantiate it.
I got deep into this philosophy after watching an exec waste resources for over a year and a half on a project that nobody wanted. When we started scrutinizing decisions with WSJF and nothing he wanted to ranked highly enough based on the math, the entire organization got better. It does wonders to eliminate the squeaky wheel problem too.
> What's more important than "politics" is your ability to communicate in terms that people making decisions will understand.
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.
Not that I disagree with the article, but I wish the title was clarified to office politics.
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.
Website and original unedited title: Stop Avoiding Politics
This is what I always try to emphasize to the junior guys I've worked with. I read the book Flowers for Algernon when I was younger and it was the thing that stood out to me the most.
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.
Politics is any question of the form "what should we do?"
If you don't want to be involved in answering questions like that, then by all means avoid politics.
Both if you don't want to be involved in answering them and you can accept whatever answer other people come up with.
1 office politics tip for engineers: engineers are helpful people, people who believe in putting in hard work now because future benefits.
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.
I don't think this is "politics" but even if it technically is, the term has such negative connotations that I think we're better off approaching the scenarios from a different angle, rather than trying to rescue "politics". Start by telling yourself "I will assume the best in motivations and most charitable interpretation." Now approach the "Why?" like a cultural anthropologist: How did we get here? What clues can I find that explain the current state? What artifacts are out there? How is communication organized? What's the hierarchy structure? Who or what are notable influences? Talk to lots of people. Ask lots of open questions. Listen. Sketch literal and conceptual diagrams of "how this all works".
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.
On some level this is just a technicality. When people talk about politics they almost always talk about bad politics because good politics doesn’t feel like politics. It just feels like things are working correctly.
It is a technicality, but an important one IMO, because using bad terminology causes unnecessary confusion. I would definitely say that most of what the article describes as "good politics" is not politics at all, but more like just the soft skills part of a normal engineering job.
"Think about the last time a terrible technical decision got pushed through at your company. Maybe it was adopting some overcomplicated architecture, or choosing a vendor that everyone knew was wrong, or killing a project that was actually working. I bet if you dig into what happened, you’ll find it wasn’t because the decision-makers were stupid. It’s because the people with the right information weren’t in the room."
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.
I find being outspoken is a great way to be heard and visible, but if I'm being honest my entire personality is confrontational.
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.
I think the problem here is the implication of the term "politics". We've been conditioned (at least in the US) to think of politics as a tribalistic "us vs. them" activity where interactions have winners and losers.
The classic picture of "office politics" is about either damaging reputations with gossip or getting special treatment because of who you know instead of what you know.
But this depiction strikes me as less about that dirty version of politics and more about simply accepting that social grease is important in an organization. Teamwork is important. Crafting the message to the recipient is important. Inclusiveness and a shared sense of ownership is important. Culture is important.
I detest and refuse to engage in tribalism - workplace or otherwise. But I 100% believe in the stuff from the previous paragraph.
Yeah, this article says things like "understand the big picture" and "keep higher-ups informed about what's really important" and claims this is "good politics." No, that's probably just part of your job. Are there really people out there saying not to do these things? I'm left with the impression that the article is arguing against a straw man, because there is definitely something called workplace politics that engineers (rightly) try to avoid, but it's not what the article seems to be describing.
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.
Should be titled Stop Avoiding Workplace Politics?
It’s not a discussion of the toxic political environment we live in today.
It turns out that that the degree to which you can avoid politics is proportional to the number of other people involved. You can probably safely ignore international politics: there are around 8 billion other people involved in it, and unless you are prepared to devote most of your time to it, you probably aren't going to move any needles anywhere.
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 would say, toxic politics is also just the bad politics the OP is talking about. Basically by the definition of the OP, I think pretty much most populism qualifies as bad politics. Politics beyond the workplace can work very similar to the one within. I know people who did 'good politics' within their work context and were asked to actual enter local politics. IMHO this is the best case. While I guess we also need career politicians, I see the biggest value in people that enter politics at a later stage.
To me, "populism" in the workplace shows up as pitting two groups against each other for personal gain.
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.
A good clickbait title though, I probably wouldn't have clicked otherwise...
My reward for clickbait is that I stop reading it
We put workplace politics in the title above, and also switched from the baity "Stop avoiding" to a more representative phrase from the article.
Hmm, feel like the new title is pretty lifeless. I wouldn't have clicked this (very good IMHO) article with the current title.
"Stop Avoiding Workplace Politics" would represent it better - it's addressing people (like me) who sometimes fancy themselves above it.
Ok, I've done that above except I replaced stop with don't. ("Stop" is a linkbait trope.)
> Share your wins, present at all-hands
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.
The HN title "what good workplace politics looks like in practice" is less clear than the article's actual title (and, the article's actual point), "Stop avoiding politics"
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.
If you are doing one thing (politics) you are not doing something else.
> It’s because the people with the right information weren’t in the room.
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.
> I bet if you dig into what happened, you’ll find it wasn’t because the decision-makers were stupid. It’s because the people with the right information weren’t in the room.
Or, the people with the decision making power just had a different opinion made a decision irrespective of "right information"
> Politics is just how humans coordinate in groups.
"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.
Beware of corporate cultures that encourage employee/teammate feedback and provide mechanisms for collecting it anonymously (often a function of HR software).
Anonymous feedback is almost always destructive, the exception being when the leaders of large organizations seek employee sentiment.
"Politics is just how humans coordinate in groups. It’s the invisible network of relationships, influence, and informal power that exists in every organization. You can refuse to participate, but that doesn’t make it go away. It just means decisions get made without you."
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.
Book Recommendation: High Conflict by Amanda Ripley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE_MEu7xn8Y
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1982128569
Politics here is collaboration. Example given on tool selection seems like lacked good engineering and oversight in terms of trade studies or boards found in larger orgs.
All life is politics, and workspaces are not politics exempt. The world we live in understandably makes many cynics. Yes, still we want no kings, and more politics in and out of our workspaces.
> Now I think the opposite: politics isn’t the problem; bad politics is. And pretending politics doesn’t exist? That’s how bad politics wins.
Feels like that's how extremism wins? If no one wants to confront other's political ideas, out of fear irrational responses,
At least in the United States, Americans are more unified on issues than the current executive branch, or (at the very least) the largest main stream media outlet would have you believe. It'd be great if people worked at the center, dealing with outcomes. There's far too much talking past each other, as people stand on their mountain of comfortable points, far too many who ignore evidence as soon as it does not conform to their world view.
>the current executive branch . . . the largest main stream media outlet
The OP is about office politics.
This has nothing to do with the article…
Are you saying it's not applicable? Or the examples don't work?
I am saying your reply about “politics” on the national level have nothing to do with “workplace politics”.
I disagree with the OP.
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.
And you get absolutely nowhere besides being a mid level developer if you avoid office politics. I don’t care what your title is, if you are just heads down pulling tickets off the board, you are a mid level developer according to every leveling guideline I’ve seen by companies that have one - including BigTech.
After that it’s about “scope” and “impact”. You can’t have either without managing up, down and horizontally.
There's no way to avoid politics to avoid getting fired, it just means that when you get laid off you picked the wrong thing, and basically did it incidentally because you refused to forecast what project was going to be culled. Most software projects fail, and working harder on a failure won't get you anywhere.
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.
Unfortunately most corporate politics is dominated by those who do it professionally
There is a saying "People are politics. How can you avoid people?".
he’s pushing for ‘office politics’ not national politics.
> Good politics is just being strategic about relationships and influence in the service of good outcomes.
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.
This, this, this, but with a few caveats I’ve learned for myself (both government politics and corporate politics):
* Politics in a derogatory sense is simply bad governance. It’s bad ideas leading to bad decisions, often supported by bad data or bad justifications. In government, that “bad” might be a shade of “-ism” (corporatism, fascism, authoritarianism, racism, sexism, etc), while in corporate realms it’s often either straight dicta from the executive team or manipulative malfeasance from bad actors further down the chain
* Good politics and good governance are indistinguishable from one another, by and large.
* If consensus is reached by those acting in the best interests of the organization in the long haul, everyone involved should feel fairly invigorated afterwards. That rush is what gets folks into politics more broadly, and is how movements grow
* Cooperation, historically, breeds more success than mere competition. Bad actors wielding politics as a cudgel generally try to deter others from participating because they desire competition as a means of preventing others from achieving success.
* Politics isn’t necessarily deceitful, as the OP gets into. It’s about building relationships and understanding goals, then acting collaboratively to achieve them.
* “Politics-free zones” only serve to enable the bad actors in a space, who use that label to advance their (often indefensible) ideals and clamp down on dissent.
A lot of us in tech need to do better with politics if we want technology to change the world for the better, instead of merely serve the whims of billionaire griftos or regimes hostile to human rights.
Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but I remember that there used to be times when slop like this (and some other similar stop I've recently seen getting posted in here) was just not a thing, at least not at this level. I mean, this is really sloppy, it doesn't mean anything and a lot of things at the same time, it doesn't mention anything concrete.
> 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.
TL;DR:
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.
> Stop pretending you’re above politics. You’re not. Nobody is. The only question is whether you’ll get good at it or keep losing to people who already are.
False. You do not lose if you do not play. You can offer your expertise/opinions and point out places where things could be improved, but at the end of the day, just treat work as someone paying for your time. If you've advised them on how to best make use of that time, and they want to do something else, well it's their money.
it depends on whether you want to live life with work-as-someone-paying-for-your-time or whether you want to live life as work-as-perfecting-and-delivering-on-craft
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
If I need to dig into social engineering and extrovert masking to be an effective engineer I probably should also look for another job. I hate places where this borderline nepotism is the only way to get anything done.
Oh well, I'll just endure it until the job market relaxes a little.
You can hone your skills while still maintaining a healthy detachment. You make your case at a thing, business decides to do something else that you think is dumb. You only "lose" if you were overly attached to the decision in the first place. Otherwise you simply get a chance to observe the outcome, see what went well/poorly, and reflect on whether/how you were totally right all along. Next time you have a clearer understanding and perhaps will be able to better articulate your position. You didn't lose. You gained experience and wisdom. You always win as long as you're open to do so. The business lost by listening to the wrong person.
I’ve heard it called both “killing the unchosen alternative” or “Professional Subordination”
https://www.manager-tools.com/forums/deceit-and-murdering-un...
Amazon’s LP is “Disagree and Commit”
And, indeed, perfection of the craft involves politics: it's not just understanding the technical space, it's about, eventually, understanding why other people see that space differently, what their goals are, how those goals overlap or don't, and how technical choices feed into that social layer.
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.
I think this is saying the same thing as the author, with the possible exception that the author is operating under the assumption that curtailing one's career at a particular level is "losing." It isn't for everyone, and it's a perfectly rational decision to top out as a really good individual contributor or senior software engineer.
... 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.
I have never seen a company with leveling guidelines consider a “senior engineer” as someone who dutifully just pulls tickets off the board and doesn’t have to lead major initiatives that involve dealing with other people.
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.
While I agree that avoiding/ignoring politics isn't helpful to anyone, it still doesn't have a place at work. My view is, people are going to disagree on politics, and therefore it just gets into a debate, or worse, an agrument at the office or in chat and makes the whole situation more ugly than the manager and/or employer wants to have to deal with.
The author presents two options: think you’re above politics, or practice it. I admit that, when I was younger, I did believe the first for a while, but what it progressed to was an option C: accept that politics, in some form, is necessary and affects me, then choose to spend as much of my life as possible on other things. If politics is necessary then boy is farming necessary, yet I’m not a farmer. Medicine is necessary, yet I’m not a doctor; defense is necessary, yet I’m not a soldier. These jobs are entrusted to others. We live in a highly specialized society, with which comes the gift of being free to choose beautiful things to feed our limited life energy to, and the curse of being ineffectual in any area we sacrifice little for. Because we’ll be consistently outperformed by those who give more to that area, and less to every other endeavor and principle.
Sometimes, in both workplaces and countries, we enter a state in which we’re forced to feed more of ourselves to the beast. The state’s name is desperation. It’s a tragic state, like reversion to a society in which we spend all our time finding food. People in such a state can’t create science or art.