Ask HN: Resources for introverted devs to learn workplace politics?

This is a throw-away account. I have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and don't disclose that to the community or my employers. My advice might be helpful as people with my condition have difficulty in the workplace.

A part of becoming a senior/lead developer is, in my experience, largely a social endeavor. At some point the problems one faces are not tractable for a single engineer to face alone. There is a finite limit on your time and many unknown problems that can overwhelm even the most astute and exemplary developer cannot be avoided. This is where you need to learn to delegate responsibility for certain tasks to other team members and learn to lead everyone in the right direction towards a common goal.

Your intuitions are correct: this is a skill you will have to learn and good on you for asking for advice. I treat it like another engineering problem: a distributed consensus protocol with high latency in the average case.

For reading material other people have recommended _How to Win Friends and Influence People_. I have found the advice in this book to be practical for dealing with interpersonal relationships in the workplace and learning how to gain and use influence. Influence is a social currency that I have found to be effective in negotiating disagreements and convincing people to adopt your ideas.

For learning how to work in a team as a leader or manager I also recommend _Extreme Ownership_ by Jocko Willinck [0]. It has provided me a framework to use which has been helpful as my career has transitioned into leadership and management. I have been fortunate enough that my team has been receptive to these practices although getting there has been difficult.

One of the harder lessons to learn is how to deliver constructive criticism and feedback in an engineering context. This is especially difficult for someone like me when communicating with junior engineers on my team in code review. It's one of my greater weaknesses but is sometimes an asset when I do succeed at showing someone why type theory matters or how an appropriate use of a data structure can improve performance. The problem I have the most difficulty with is when a senior colleague on my team insists on a factually incorrect assertion and forces their opinion by using misleading questions and rhetoric. Unfortunately I have not come across any books or courses on constructive criticism to share.

I do find the Recurse Center's Code of Conduct to be a good guide as well: https://www.recurse.com/code-of-conduct

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23848190-extreme-ownersh...

Dealing with people is challenging and exhausting however having a framework for interactions and setting expectations ahead of time helps make these challenges po

Lots of good advice, so I'll attack it from a different angle.

In my experience step 0 is to acknowledge that these personality traits are not essential parts of your identity. We all go through periods where we are more or less introverted.

That doesn't mean change is easy, but it's an important foundation for making the change.

After that I would focus on practice above all else. I would seek out social activities ( hiking groups, maker groups, charity groups, etc) where you can casually be social. Try to take on leadership roles (e.g. organizing meetups, taking minutes, recruitment, etc).

There's tons of great advice, but much like learning a language, the best way to learn the "social language" is by doing.

Getting this experience out of the office first is a risk-free way to build your social strengths.

Really great topic thanks for bringing it up.

There has been some good advice on how you can work on your social skills but that's only part of your problem. The other part of your problem is the type of customer you're dealing with. Sales/marketing folks are often highly non-linear thinkers who live and die by their soft skills. So you are probably going to find that how they feel about you is going to dominate your relationship and status with them more than any actual results. In most sales/marketing environments I've seen you can pretty much toss things like logic, formal processes and written specs out the window. The mental space they live in and environment they operate in is very different than say finance or engineering which tends to be at the other end of the spectrum.

Something to seriously consider is trying to get out of that environment... it's not for everyone. You don't necessarily need to leave the company, but rather as you develop your social skills try to start building relationships in other departments and use them to find a path out. Politics are everywhere but the degree to which politics drive things can vary considerably from department to department and is often less dominant in less 'squishy' parts of the business.

It's a terminological difference, and I totally get your point of view. I also agree that some amount of politics is the cost of doing business (but per my point about rising in the corporate hierarchy, it shouldn't be something that impinges on the average employee's success).

Negotiation between people who have a shared idea of what goals are, but different ideas of how to get there is a good thing, and I can see how it makes sense to call it politics. Actively cultivating influence by undermining other people, shifting blame and only focusing on your own advancement is bad, and what I was referring to.

Many techies (myself included) do not like smalltalk. There is no point to it. An interesting theory about that is "The Psychopath Code" by Pieter Hintjens [0]: People do it because it makes detecting psychopaths easier. You could try to turn it into a game. Find the psychopaths at work.

[0] http://hintjens.com/blog:_psychopaths