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Don't avoid workplace politics

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#121

Post by wat10000 »

bonoboTP wrote: post #118
wat10000 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

> 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 pe…

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.

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#122

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

ionwake wrote: post #50

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…

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.

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#123

Post by tbrownaw »

> 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.

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#124

Post by zanellato19 »

garciasn wrote: post #70
eawgewag wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#125

Post by Loughla »

silvestrov wrote: post #48
exmadscientist wrote: post #31

> 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 pres…

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.

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#126

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

ndriscoll wrote: post #36
galenmarchetti wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 u…

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”

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#127

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #29
ndriscoll wrote: post #13

> 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 tha…

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 jus…

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.

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#128

Post by obviouslynotme »

johnfn wrote: post #64
citizenpaul wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 tha…

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.

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#129

Post by bravetraveler »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #56
amarant wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#130

Post by surgical_fire »

scarface_74 wrote: post #75
rossdavidh wrote: post #24

"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.…

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…

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

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