How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer • Hacker News Board

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#171

Post by charlie0 » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 3:24 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #65

getnormality wrote: post #15

It seems like this post can be summarized as follows: 1. If your manager has something in particular they want you to do, you should do it. 2. If your manager doesn't have something in particular they want you to do, you should figure out what they will want you to do in the future , and make any necessary preparations so that it will be doable when they want it. I'd say it's good advice. The only thing I would add i…

> 1. If your manager has something in particular they want you to do, you should do it. This point seems obvious, but it's one topics I've had to coach many early career people on over and over again. Many of the people who were having difficulties or heading toward PIP could be turned around by implementing a simple loop where they: 1. Ask their manager for the top priority, explicitly. Re-confirm the top priority e…

What do you do if your manager sends you on boondoggles of a project?

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#172

Post by dehugger » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 3:55 AM UTC

j_san wrote: post #152

MarkMarine wrote: post #39

One of my favorite quotes: “ Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” - Milton Friedman I’ve found writing 1 pagers and techn…

What does it mean to make your 1 pagers and technical documents "float around" in your case?

Send them to coworkers. I've had success with the same strategy. There are three important parts required to make this work though: 1) Have a reputation solid enough that people are willing to take the time to read what you send them. 2) Read the room and write ideas/proposals on topics that are of interest and are relevant to the organization. 3) Find an audience that can provide meaningful support (basically, people with clout)

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#173

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 5:05 AM UTC

getnormality wrote: post #15

It seems like this post can be summarized as follows: 1. If your manager has something in particular they want you to do, you should do it. 2. If your manager doesn't have something in particular they want you to do, you should figure out what they will want you to do in the future , and make any necessary preparations so that it will be doable when they want it. I'd say it's good advice. The only thing I would add i…

[deleted]

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#174

Post by MarkMarine » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 5:28 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #159

MarkMarine wrote: post #39

One of my favorite quotes: “ Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” - Milton Friedman I’ve found writing 1 pagers and techn…

> 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…

I’m dumb about it. I don’t have a scheme, I don’t have a hidden agenda, I don’t have ulterior motives… I’ve got what I think is great engineering (divorced from what the customer or business wants in the short term) and I just diligently try to make that happen. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve always got the long term health of the system (and fairness to the workers next to me ) in mind. I say the same thing to everyone, I’m open and honest, and I get wrecked every time I try to execute any strategy that doesn’t accidentally align with something a VP wants.

Ya’ll are so much better at this it’s scary. I can’t really read when I’m being lied to in the moment, I usually naively believe that support I’m getting is because my ideas are good, or that management has the same view of the collective good that I do.

I spent a while in the marines as an enlisted man, lower NCO. There is no politics and people next to you have to trust each other with their lives. I never really made the turn to what the world is outside of that, I’ve always struggled with it.

I learned not to try. Ya’ll can do politics. I’ll write one pagers and wait for my chances to make things better.

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#175

Post by AbbeFaria » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 5:56 AM UTC

I work at MSFT. Everything the author says is 100% true not only at MSFT but probably at every Mag-7 company.

It’s also the same reason why MSFT doesn’t have a blockbuster AI product.

1. At work or for personal use, I use GPT-5 or Claude Code. I am forced to use Copilot because that has access to internal company data but it’s nowhere close to GPT-5 or Claude.

2. MSFT open sourced VS code but on its own couldn’t engineer products like Cursor or Windsurf. Lets leave aside the economics of these products for now.

The regular down in the trenches engineer like myself is so busy thinking about how I can advance my career by playing political games, currying favour with my manager or manager’s manager that little time gets spent on product building.

Good thing MSFT has all the cash in the world to invest in companies like OAI, GitHub etc because the bureaucracy is stifling at MSFT.

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#176

Post by dilyevsky » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 6:57 AM UTC

herval wrote: post #164

SeanAnderson wrote: post #13

Man, I must not have worked at dysfunctional enough companies. I can't relate to the opening remarks in this article at all. I'm used to really open communication from the top down and, even when we build in a direction I disagree with, we've discussed things enough that I'm at least interested in seeing why someone else I consider intelligent sees the world so differently. Perhaps it has to do with only working for…

Big American corporations (and to lesser extent, other countries that try to mimic US corporate culture) operate in a particularly dysfunctional ways. There’s ample literature on it (moral mazes, bullshit jobs and five dysfunctions of a team are particularly good books on the topic). You’re lucky to not have been a victim of that system!

I have seen how some big european and asian companies operate and every dysfunction which you can point out in an american corp is usually way worse there. Plus there’s some additional ones due to local customs

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#177

Post by dilyevsky » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 7:00 AM UTC

gtowey wrote: post #117

johnfn wrote: post #48

A lot of the frustration I typically hear in this camp is something like “well I shipped a huge refactor that cleaned up all the code, why does no one appreciate that?” One particular interaction that got me thinking was a few years ago listening to an acquaintance telling me how he spent months meticulously cleaning up the data pipeline and making it perfect, and how no one appreciated this work. Like, as an enginee…

Although I agree with this, I can also think of a counter example by analogy. If you're on a construction project and you, say, spend a bunch of time inspecting and maintaining the safety systems so that you prevent any accidents that seriously injure or kill someone, it's an all-too-common problem that management doesn't think you've done anything and doesn't reward the effort. It's a huge failure of management that…

This is commonly referred to as McNamara Fallacy

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#178

Post by dilyevsky » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 7:02 AM UTC

fullstackwife wrote: post #118

johnfn wrote: post #48

A lot of the frustration I typically hear in this camp is something like “well I shipped a huge refactor that cleaned up all the code, why does no one appreciate that?” One particular interaction that got me thinking was a few years ago listening to an acquaintance telling me how he spent months meticulously cleaning up the data pipeline and making it perfect, and how no one appreciated this work. Like, as an enginee…

Think chefs at top restaurants for example: washing hands is something obvious, no need to get any customer infected with fecal bacteria in order to convince the restaurant management for investing into soap (hygiene takes time, you could serve additional customer!) It is one of career progression milestones for a programmer when they can set a bar for their craftsmanship themselves. Successful SWE is someone who got…

Im actually curious what happens in a professional kitchen when someone isnt pulling weight on menial tasks like scrubbing or batch prep. I know what usually happens in software teams - nothing

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#179

Post by rkomorn » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 7:09 AM UTC

dilyevsky wrote: post #178

fullstackwife wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think chefs at top restaurants for example: washing hands is something obvious, no need to get any customer infected with fecal bacteria in order to convince the restaurant management for investing into soap (hygiene takes time, you could serve additional customer!) It is one of career progression milestones for a programmer when they can set a bar for their craftsmanship themselves. Successful SWE is someone who got…

Im actually curious what happens in a professional kitchen when someone isnt pulling weight on menial tasks like scrubbing or batch prep. I know what usually happens in software teams - nothing

Having worked in professional kitchens, my experience is that nothing predictable happens.

It depends not just on management, but also on the personal relationship between management and the person, and on how bad the current market for staff is.

That said, the kitchens I've worked in were filled with people who worked as hard, or harder than the FAANG teams I was a part of.

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#180

Post by weinzierl » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 7:20 AM UTC

This is good advice but it has one flaw that makes it unrealistic for most software engineers.

"Scheming takes practice and power, and neither of those things are available to software engineers."

Most of us are terrible at scheming not only, not even primarily, because of a lack of practice. It is a lack a of information.

All the advice from the article assumes you know what the people above you really want. Reliable information about this is the precondition for blatant scheming as well as the subtle influencing the article promotes, yet is the hardest part to achieve. Make a mistake their and you'll actively hurt your career.

Hiding your real motives is a main part of politics and you should expect that anyone above you will do it to some degree. Navigating that well is simply not in the skill set of most technical peope who generally appreciate openness.