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."
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.
> 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.
Thanks for sharing, and a good example why for me all those values trainings are worthless, they are lies that get spread across meetings, placed on adversting material, told to junior employees, and hardly anyone follows them in practice, other than doing that yearly training to check a checklist.
"No politics" is politics. It may even be the worst kind.
Companies are all about making money, and politics is one way to achieve that. Saying "no politics" is like asking employees to not care about money, it is not going to happen, and there is an implicit "but it doesn't apply to me".
But then, there might be two different kinds of politics:
One is a cordial game of soft power exchange, getting things done and everyone winning at the end of the day. No malicious intent, just day to day frustrations boiling over here & there. Tomorrow is another, we are friends again tomorrow & will succeed tomorrow. Forgiveness & forgetting is in good supply. Some amount of grace is allowed, no drawing blood. Help each other up when down (even if via manipulation).
The other kind of politics is basically a blood sport. Its a game of hard power exchange where people try to dominate and humiliate each other. There is almost no self-preservation, no care about tomorrow, no learning, no adapting - only the next way to slaughter you opponent, setting legal traps, messing with their personal lives. Zero grace. These kinds of games & people often do not care about the the goal, the company or product - they only care about winning at the blood sport and each interaction for them is a way to gather data, search for weak spots and so on. Its not enough to win, you have to humiliate and oppress another's spirit. Kick the person while they are down. Certain corps attracts a couple of these contestants and soon you have a full floor of psycho's playing a vicious game. For them it feels normal.
So its best to find groups/companies with good people that plays the gentle game (and keeping the bad apples out), that knows it is all made up & essentially role play, that doesn't crave blood. Its the only places where you can really succeed as a human. The other kind you only succeed at drawing blood and destroying others, while enjoying it.
I suspect that the people who enjoy the blood sport are disproportionately drawn to the kind of places that loudly proclaim "no politics" or "we're all equal" without having the proper defenses in place.
Or perhaps, more accurately, they're drawn to places without defenses: both those that are pretend egalitarian but have informal power hierarchies without accountability; as well as those that outright say "we're in it for the game", like the stereotypical high-pressure investment bank.
Politics begins as soon as there is more than one person involved. As much as I want to avoid it, I just can’t. And if I have to do it anyway, I might just as well give it my best shot.
Smalltalk and professional exchange aren't politics, the author is conflating the too.
When people say "no politics" they mean have a position on certain issues that mostly are off topic in a business environment.
For example if I have my group where nobody is religeous. You could rant about how stupid religeous people are because nobody would feel particularly attacked and some would nod along. Disregarding that the pittyful self-revelation from pointing at others calling them stupid, this is a political stance.
But we employ people from all over the world and viewpoints change. Some don't have the most dense main stream belief you find everywhere. You don't go into the next office and pronounce how atheism is the best thing. That is meant with "no politics". It is a requirement for multi-cultural exchange without immediate conflict. It is of course not restricted to religion.
The auther misunderstood what politics means. What he describes is office and relationship dynamics. There is quite a bit of overlap, especially when it comes to signal your viewpoints and perspectives in the hope to get recognition. I would be careful about that in a professional environment though. Depends on the company and how many cultures meet each other in random watercooler talk.
You can convolute the terms here, but it just blurrs the precision of any statement.
That said, relationship dynamics or "power play" leads to an effect where the most competent people often aren't the most well liked people. That is unfortunate and not very new. But the problem cannot be adressed by "talking more about politics". On the contrary, it would make things much, much worse.
That's politics in the office, not office politics.
But you are right that the author is mixing things up: Office politics isn't collaboration as described in the article. Office politics refers to things like one-upmanship, taking credit for stuff, playing the blame game - making yourself look good and others look bad, to get raises or promotions. Or for a phrase used in the article, office politics is about becoming a scheming backstabber.
Succeed in which way? Some empty career in some soulless company that doesn't care about you? Some miniscule extra cash on the account? Those are not proper life successes in any meaningful way.
Most of engineers are rather introverts with rich internal life and strong imagination. You can lose most of it and transform for more 'success' over time, but at great costs to yourself. I am not arguing against say better communication or organizational skills, we all benefit from it, but you can't avoid various form of highly functioning sociopaths once you climb above ground level. Those tend to drag weaker individuals down to their rabbit holes. That's the core of the 'politics' I've seen over past 20 years in all corporations I've worked for. Looking at people and measuring how good relationship is right now, how you can use them, how worthy they are. Forging alliances always doing such calculus in your mind, everything is a chess board, everybody is a chess figure.
Don't forget how you behave and think at work will end up permeating rest of your life, you are just you in all places. One example I see very consistently - folks promoted to more responsibility get over time much bigger egos, very few are immune to this and one has to realize it and actively fight it to avoid it.
Be a good human being, help others in need, be a properly good parent, husband, son/daughter, friend. For many folks high on organizational charts, in above metrics they failed in life while drowning in money of career. No thank you.
What you wrote resonated with me, I think the same way and so, allow me the pushback. :)
Does it have to be that way, a severance type of scenario where the work life is opposite of the "life" life ? I feel that it should, perhaps could, be different. Yeah, it depends on what you do for a living, your need for money and so on, but do people that win at career always lose at life ?
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
I used to do that, but decided it was deceptive and harmful. You are not describing reality by saying "we" if you did everything. You are creating a social manipulation. It is better to just accurately describe what happened and allow the correct information to flow through the organization, leading to better decision making. For example, you will have the tools to deal with people who maliciously steal your credit when they say "we" about the work you did, without which you wouldn't be able to address the consequent distortions and harm to the organization if they are to be promoted or given more responsibility. Free riders will be exposed more quickly, giving leaders the ability to more rapidly self-correct the team, and reducing grievances of individuals carrying too much of the weight.
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
It depends on the manager, whether they repeatedly recognize/name the individual contributor (or team), and use the project's success to get good outcomes for that person (increment, bonus, promotion). Not all managers are incompetent or corrupt..
You need to give credit where credit is due, if you are presenting someone else's work and they put in the majority of the work you must share that. Yes you may have been part of it and perhaps even reviewed it, but you must give them significant credit.
Nobody likes people who take credit for others work and it will be quickly found out. Particularly if the work gets critiqued and you are asked to stand by it.
But of course that's only for things with positive outcomes. If it's negative Alice would start saying "we" and "I" and then come up with a solution that can again give Bob credit because of the positive outcome in fixing something.
"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.
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 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
I worked at a place where without any of the tech staff knowing about it, the CEO literally signed a $600k/yr Adobe Experience Manager contract on a golf course with the Adobe Salesweasel, and it didn't get used at all. As far as anyone knows that bill got paid for two more years before that same CEO flew the whole company into the ground leaving ~100 people not only out of work, but unpaid for their last month and without their last 3 months worth of entitlements paid.
> 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.
C-suite stands to gain or lose most as a result of these decisions (even if a lesser loss is perceived more acutely by an engineer). Short of bribery, it's their calls to make.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Exactly my point of view. For the most part I do not root for my preferred technology, but rather try to inform my powers about the caveats I see. This way at least the right aspects to check have a chance to enter the debates above my payroll.
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.
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"
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.
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.
> Politics shows up as a failure to construct an aligned organization.
More to the point, it reflects the failure of higher-level management to construct proper policies, processes, team interfaces, and incentive structures for teams, so that the team leads will be set up to give their engineers all the ingredients for happiness at work: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Constructing proper policies, processes, team interfaces, and incentive structures is really hard and much harder to well than most people give credit for. It is virtually always bespoke, building on individual personalities and the tools available. Balancing policies and processes with agility requires significant self-discipline on the part of upper-management to not just run roughshod over their policies and processes.
The question is whether you're optimistic or pessimistic about your upper-management. If you're optimistic about them, then you have Lawful Good upper-management that is interested in building out these governing structures that are needed for building collaborative culture. But if you accept that the vast majority of upper-management is human and flawed (like the rest of us), and there are very few Lawful Good upper-managers around, then you accept politics as a necessary evil, at least in that particular organization.
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.
Where I work is definitely positive-sum, but I still have to make a little noise, build connections, etc. And it's not one of those things where the situation would be better if nobody did that.
I find this take naive. First, to have a zero sum game or indeed a positive sum game you have to be playing with perfect information with rationally behaving actors. Given most organisations have high levels of uncertainty and are resource constrained you can’t rationally make positive sum game decisions as the interpretation of uncertainty is cardinal to it - and additionally the resource constraint means different views of that uncertainty will tend to bias towards the thing they know best - engineers will find more certainty in build, marketers in marketing, designers in design - take your pick.
This necessitates collaborative information synthesis to resolve uncertainty uniformly to then be able to play a positive sum game under constraints. This is possible but it necessitates exchange of information between different business functions.
As informational clarity is a communicative process with repetitive feedback cycles, it will tend to have a big delay in the overarching system of decision-making. Therefore a shortcut is to influence, i.e. use conviction processes to shorten the cycle, rather than repeat to arbitrary infinity in order to drive perfect information alignment.
Therefore influencing is a necessary component even in an otherwise perfectly healthy and incentive aligned positive sum system of rational actors - and politics are influencing.
The problem becomes when conviction isn’t used as shortcut for informational clarity but as a method of exploitation of irrationality of human actors - this is bad politics.
What I do agree with is that putting in place right incentives, processes and organisational structure minimises politics - and in an org with rational actors this is the goal.
But good luck hiring perfectly rational actors in each function, that will still behave rationally in an economic downturn :).
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).
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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 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.
Readit News
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...
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.
"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."
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.
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.
[0] https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
I did too. It was something the CEO started saying after a particularly brutal game of thrones style purge.
I think a lot of times company values are simply "things the company did and perhaps still does for which it feels shame".
Companies are all about making money, and politics is one way to achieve that. Saying "no politics" is like asking employees to not care about money, it is not going to happen, and there is an implicit "but it doesn't apply to me".
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One is a cordial game of soft power exchange, getting things done and everyone winning at the end of the day. No malicious intent, just day to day frustrations boiling over here & there. Tomorrow is another, we are friends again tomorrow & will succeed tomorrow. Forgiveness & forgetting is in good supply. Some amount of grace is allowed, no drawing blood. Help each other up when down (even if via manipulation).
The other kind of politics is basically a blood sport. Its a game of hard power exchange where people try to dominate and humiliate each other. There is almost no self-preservation, no care about tomorrow, no learning, no adapting - only the next way to slaughter you opponent, setting legal traps, messing with their personal lives. Zero grace. These kinds of games & people often do not care about the the goal, the company or product - they only care about winning at the blood sport and each interaction for them is a way to gather data, search for weak spots and so on. Its not enough to win, you have to humiliate and oppress another's spirit. Kick the person while they are down. Certain corps attracts a couple of these contestants and soon you have a full floor of psycho's playing a vicious game. For them it feels normal.
So its best to find groups/companies with good people that plays the gentle game (and keeping the bad apples out), that knows it is all made up & essentially role play, that doesn't crave blood. Its the only places where you can really succeed as a human. The other kind you only succeed at drawing blood and destroying others, while enjoying it.
Or perhaps, more accurately, they're drawn to places without defenses: both those that are pretend egalitarian but have informal power hierarchies without accountability; as well as those that outright say "we're in it for the game", like the stereotypical high-pressure investment bank.
When people say "no politics" they mean have a position on certain issues that mostly are off topic in a business environment.
For example if I have my group where nobody is religeous. You could rant about how stupid religeous people are because nobody would feel particularly attacked and some would nod along. Disregarding that the pittyful self-revelation from pointing at others calling them stupid, this is a political stance.
But we employ people from all over the world and viewpoints change. Some don't have the most dense main stream belief you find everywhere. You don't go into the next office and pronounce how atheism is the best thing. That is meant with "no politics". It is a requirement for multi-cultural exchange without immediate conflict. It is of course not restricted to religion.
The auther misunderstood what politics means. What he describes is office and relationship dynamics. There is quite a bit of overlap, especially when it comes to signal your viewpoints and perspectives in the hope to get recognition. I would be careful about that in a professional environment though. Depends on the company and how many cultures meet each other in random watercooler talk.
You can convolute the terms here, but it just blurrs the precision of any statement.
That said, relationship dynamics or "power play" leads to an effect where the most competent people often aren't the most well liked people. That is unfortunate and not very new. But the problem cannot be adressed by "talking more about politics". On the contrary, it would make things much, much worse.
But you are right that the author is mixing things up: Office politics isn't collaboration as described in the article. Office politics refers to things like one-upmanship, taking credit for stuff, playing the blame game - making yourself look good and others look bad, to get raises or promotions. Or for a phrase used in the article, office politics is about becoming a scheming backstabber.
Most of engineers are rather introverts with rich internal life and strong imagination. You can lose most of it and transform for more 'success' over time, but at great costs to yourself. I am not arguing against say better communication or organizational skills, we all benefit from it, but you can't avoid various form of highly functioning sociopaths once you climb above ground level. Those tend to drag weaker individuals down to their rabbit holes. That's the core of the 'politics' I've seen over past 20 years in all corporations I've worked for. Looking at people and measuring how good relationship is right now, how you can use them, how worthy they are. Forging alliances always doing such calculus in your mind, everything is a chess board, everybody is a chess figure.
Don't forget how you behave and think at work will end up permeating rest of your life, you are just you in all places. One example I see very consistently - folks promoted to more responsibility get over time much bigger egos, very few are immune to this and one has to realize it and actively fight it to avoid it.
Be a good human being, help others in need, be a properly good parent, husband, son/daughter, friend. For many folks high on organizational charts, in above metrics they failed in life while drowning in money of career. No thank you.
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".
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.
Hearing about "politics" in a neutral/positive way would be new to me.
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 )
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.
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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
Nobody likes people who take credit for others work and it will be quickly found out. Particularly if the work gets critiqued and you are asked to stand by it.
This isn't some fancy law, but general decency.
So you can get only get to the top when you spread coins around.
There is a very clear and well established path to the top for people who only care about themselves.
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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".
I've lost count of how many times something was proposed and rejected by everyone in the chain except the C-suite. Then the C-suite overrode the process decisions basically because they played golf with someone outside the company.
I was once even part of a vendor assessment that was rejected and it turned out that the CEO had already given the green light and signed paperwork weeks before so we all were just wasting our time on something that had been decided unilaterally.
It's like two people discussing how to handle difficult conversations in a romantic relationship, and a third guy comes in and says "this conversation is irrelevant because every time I date someone they cheat on me". I'm sorry you're dealing with that problem, but it is not really related to the topic at hand.
Every Oracle adoption for the past 40 years
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 worked at a place where without any of the tech staff knowing about it, the CEO literally signed a $600k/yr Adobe Experience Manager contract on a golf course with the Adobe Salesweasel, and it didn't get used at all. As far as anyone knows that bill got paid for two more years before that same CEO flew the whole company into the ground leaving ~100 people not only out of work, but unpaid for their last month and without their last 3 months worth of entitlements paid.
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.
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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.
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.
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1) Since around 2008 I’ve had 8 jobs after staying at my second job for nine years. Whether I was laid off or chose to get another job because of salary compression and inversion, being able to get a job quickly - and it’s never taken me more than a month even in 2023 and last year - was partially because at now 51, I have made damn sure I stay up to date with real world use of the “latest hotness”.
2) see #1
3) if you are a VC backed company, your shining light is not “make a good product”. It’s “the exit” and shortly afterwards a blog post about “our amazing journey” where they announce the product is going to be shut down.
The goal of politics in the office is not to do “the right thing”. It’s to stay in alignment with the people who control your paycheck and to make sure you can keep exchanging money for labor when time comes to her another job.
For a very long time it was the only thing I focused. Quite often the job itself is pretty easy, getting in is the hard part.
In the past couple of years I let it slide a bit because keeping yourself sharp for interviews is sort of a pain in the ass, but I promised nyself that 2026 I'm back at it
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.
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.
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.
With good leadership, politics won't feel like politics. Everything this article describes as "good politics" is definitely good stuff to do, but none of it should feel like politics to your typical "I hate politics" engineer. Building relationships? That's just meeting interesting coworkers. Understanding the real incentives? That's keeping the big picture in mind, a standard requirement for any engineer. Managing up effectively? A good manager will treat you like the expert that you are and that happens automatically. Creating win-win situations? That's that big picture thing again. Being visible? Who doesn't like to share the cool stuff they've done?
I hate politics. I do all of those "good politics" things and I enjoy all of it. It might technically be "politics" but it's not what we think of when we say the word.
This article boils down to a semantic argument. They want to carve out a section of the job and put it under the label of "politics" when most of us would not put it there. That label may be right, it may be wrong, but I don't really care. It's just not an interesting argument. I think this article would be a lot better if it dropped the P word entirely and just explained why and how you should do the "good" things it lists.
Certainly many would prefer to just enter flow state and work on their craft, work the wood with the chisel (=do the engineering work), etc. It is of course not a good strategy in reality, and it doesn't matter what people "want", but let's at least admit that plenty of people don't enjoy having to interact a lot. People-oriented vs thing-oriented.
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.
more often that not its based on feeling
And yes, this kind of shit happens regularly - sometimes, people even get busted for it like that Netflix executive who got kickbacks from, amongst others, Netskope [1].
Let's be real: no matter how good you are at networking - unless you come from Old Money or have a wildly successful exit under your belt, you are not joining the club of elite morons that actually pulls the strings.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executiv...
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.
More to the point, it reflects the failure of higher-level management to construct proper policies, processes, team interfaces, and incentive structures for teams, so that the team leads will be set up to give their engineers all the ingredients for happiness at work: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Constructing proper policies, processes, team interfaces, and incentive structures is really hard and much harder to well than most people give credit for. It is virtually always bespoke, building on individual personalities and the tools available. Balancing policies and processes with agility requires significant self-discipline on the part of upper-management to not just run roughshod over their policies and processes.
The question is whether you're optimistic or pessimistic about your upper-management. If you're optimistic about them, then you have Lawful Good upper-management that is interested in building out these governing structures that are needed for building collaborative culture. But if you accept that the vast majority of upper-management is human and flawed (like the rest of us), and there are very few Lawful Good upper-managers around, then you accept politics as a necessary evil, at least in that particular organization.
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.
This necessitates collaborative information synthesis to resolve uncertainty uniformly to then be able to play a positive sum game under constraints. This is possible but it necessitates exchange of information between different business functions.
As informational clarity is a communicative process with repetitive feedback cycles, it will tend to have a big delay in the overarching system of decision-making. Therefore a shortcut is to influence, i.e. use conviction processes to shorten the cycle, rather than repeat to arbitrary infinity in order to drive perfect information alignment.
Therefore influencing is a necessary component even in an otherwise perfectly healthy and incentive aligned positive sum system of rational actors - and politics are influencing.
The problem becomes when conviction isn’t used as shortcut for informational clarity but as a method of exploitation of irrationality of human actors - this is bad politics.
What I do agree with is that putting in place right incentives, processes and organisational structure minimises politics - and in an org with rational actors this is the goal.
But good luck hiring perfectly rational actors in each function, that will still behave rationally in an economic downturn :).
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.
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 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
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
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.
> 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.
Your comment doesn’t address the article at all.
- 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.
What's more important than "politics" is your ability to communicate in terms that people making decisions will understand. I didn't get this nuance early in my career. I was always focused on shipping, oblivious to costs: Time Cost, Opportunity Cost, etc.
Learning to make technical decisions based on Return on Investment is the real key to bridging this communications divide.
Weighted Shorted Job First (WSJF) is an approach that will bring your team and organization into thinking that way. It works wonders for getting people on the same page and it's just an ROI formula.
WSJF = Cost of Delay / Job Size
Job Size is a proxy for cost, because it's a proxy for time...which costs money.
Cost of Delay is a fancy way of estimating how valuable something is. Technically it's "User Business Value + Time Criticality + Opportunity Enablement & Risk Reduction" but it really boils down to Value + Time Criticality. Time Criticality meaning real deadlines where the value will go away if we don't hit it by the deadline. Think conference dates or contractual obligations, not sprint commitments (wanting something sooner doesn't make it time critical).
The more prepared you are, the better the case you can make for this number while those who are unprepared will simply have to guess without anything to substantiate it.
I got deep into this philosophy after watching an exec waste resources for over a year and a half on a project that nobody wanted. When we started scrutinizing decisions with WSJF and nothing he wanted to ranked highly enough based on the math, the entire organization got better. It does wonders to eliminate the squeaky wheel problem too.
Not to disagree with you overall, but I would argue that very much is politics! In other words, how do you influence "the system"? How do you sway people to your point of view, how do you get them to follow your ideas and plans?
You need your interests to be their interests, and that involves speaking their language. Some people you might persuade because they too think your idea is the right one, some you might persuade by trading favors, some you might persuade by convincing them it's the most cost-effective, etc. as described here.
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.
It does not matter how right you are if no one likes or will listen to you. Unfortunately, being likeable is inifinitely more important than being right. Your job is to strike a balance between both otherwise stupid likeable people will be dictating the direction.
It's not really about being "likeable", but being persuasive. Don't put the cart before the horse.
You're correct that being right isn't enough, but if you make being likeable a direct goal you will come off as insincere and fail.