How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

But how do you know what the management perception is of whiat is currently considered to be 'the right problem' vs 'side-quest'? To what extent is that subjective and manipulable? Or that everyone in the management chain is fighting to maximize their perceived contribution to the former and minize their perceived contribution to the latter?

Without knowing the context, it's impossible to tell whether the key word in your sentence is 'perceived' or 'achieving' or 'focus'. Or what set of people shape the perceptions. Or on what KPI. Or what if there aren't even clear metrics. Most engineers like working on designing things, not executive palace coups.

(Corollary: have you never seen a group or entire dept get sidelined by being assigned something that they're officially told is important but at some point is publicly/secretly determined not to be, at some murky point up their management chain? What happens when the Director, VP, CXO are changed, perhaps multiple times, in a project?)

> But how do you know what the management perception is of whiat is currently considered to be 'the right problem' vs 'side-quest'?

You ask.

A large number of the problems I helped people work through while mentoring came down to engineers get stuck in their own head instead of communicating.

Whenever it's not clear, you communicate. Many companies have this as a daily update ritual in standup, but some engineers treat standup like a game where they have to say the right thing to get it over with as quickly as possible before going back to their computer and forgetting what they said they were going to work on.

If ambiguity persists, it's a good idea to write a short e-mail to your manager saying you're working on X instead of Y or Z because you think that's what's best, but then finish by asking them to let you know quickly if you got it wrong.

> Corollary: have you never seen a group or entire dept get sidelined by being assigned something that they're officially told is important but at some point is publicly/secretly determined not to be

No, I have never worked at a company so dysfunctional that management will make secret decisions but forget to inform the company, or make public decisions and an entire department will ignore them.

I don't get it. What's the incentive for anyone to do this?

Though I have worked with some people who would go off on their own tangents, then when the consequences caught up with them they'd concoct excuses about how it was never communicated to them (despite us pointing to records in Slack where they acknowledged) or elaborate conspiracies about management coming up with secret changes or something.

I’ve been on both sides of the table. To me, all of those are far more palatable than petty company politics (both in BigTech and startups).

> But how do you know what the management perception is of whiat is currently considered to be 'the right problem'

Ask! Literally. But also listen.

Many people in management will repeat over and over that feature X is the thing they wake up thinking about, even though feature Y is important to the PM or director or whatever. Especially if you’re young enough that promotions and performance reviewed are really important for career growth, work on X not Y.

If your manager doesn’t start every meeting with some passive remark that project X is consuming their time, ask them what is important. Ask them what project they’re worried about.

Example:

“Hey Boss, I’ve been working on ProjY, but I also have tasks from ProjX pulled into this sprint. Which one is a bigger priority for the team, because I have 10 days of tasks, but only 1 week left in the sprint?”

… “hi boss, a week ago you told me to prioritize finishing X and not Y. Should I just allocate all of this sprint to the next set of tasks for X?”

… “hi boss. It’s me again asking this question every week “

If you want a good performance review/promotion/etc, usually that starts with your direct manager, so do what they think is important and ignore the rest. You need their trust first, so get it by working on their priorities. With their trust, you can get flashier or more fun work, or you can get them to trust you when you suggest alternative priorities, and you can earn the gossip/news they hear in management meetings from up the chain.

Your corollary is just rage-bait FUD or dysfunctional behavior. Any you can’t control it anyways so ignore it and focus on what matters that you can control. If your CXO doesn’t like what you’re working on, but your manager does, pick your manager, they actually write your performance review.

> but I’ve also been owned by VPs and directors that are much better at politics than I am.

One surprising thing I learned when I became a mid/upper manager: It's very easy to spot lower level employees playing politics.

Part of it is because most ICs or even 1st level EMs are overconfident in their ability to play politics. They commonly overestimate their own level of social/political intelligence relative to their managers.

The other part is that they just don't have as much insight and communication within the company. They think they're persuading or manipulating (depending on intentions) a certain stakeholder to form some alliance to push an agenda, but 5 minutes after that conversation that stakeholder sends a message back to their manager giving them a subtle heads up about the politicking going on. I can't count how many times we, as management, watched clumsy office politicking attempts play out while doing our best to gently keep them contained without bursting someone's bubble and making them angry.