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

#181

Post by monkeyelite » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 8:09 AM UTC

maccard wrote: post #101

Aurornis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I completely agree. I've foudn that skill never goes away no matter how far you get. The trick is as you go higher up, spotting what comes next and knowing how to solve it faster. > They get distracted, go on side quests, take too many tasks from people who aren't their manager, or avoid their manager's requests in favor of a task they find more interesting. I had a great manager when I was fresh and I watched someon…

> spotting what comes next and knowing how to solve it faster

This is such a strange mindset to me. Part of staff engineer is learning you don't need to solve tomorrow's problems. You solve it with the constraints you understand and leave room for expansion if needed.

Why do we have the opposite belief organizationally? And why as a manager would you want your top workers to be speculating about things you might want rather than achieving at the tasks you gave them?

(This is a genuine question.)

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

#182

Post by alchemism » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 8:37 AM UTC

monkeyelite wrote: post #181

maccard wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. I've foudn that skill never goes away no matter how far you get. The trick is as you go higher up, spotting what comes next and knowing how to solve it faster. > They get distracted, go on side quests, take too many tasks from people who aren't their manager, or avoid their manager's requests in favor of a task they find more interesting. I had a great manager when I was fresh and I watched someon…

> spotting what comes next and knowing how to solve it faster This is such a strange mindset to me. Part of staff engineer is learning you don't need to solve tomorrow's problems. You solve it with the constraints you understand and leave room for expansion if needed. Why do we have the opposite belief organizationally? And why as a manager would you want your top workers to be speculating about things you might want…

In certain tribal societies, there is no "chieftan" per se, there is just the guy who happens to be correct about things more than everyone else, so his opinion gets the most weight.

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

#183

Post by creer » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 8:51 AM UTC

awesome_dude wrote: post #138

creer wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Let's take that idea: > reduce vectors for bugs (which are always based on misunderstandings) Is that really impossible to measure? (For cheap that is. Cheap measure, cheap estimate, cheap confidence). Is that really impossible to monitor? Grab a random sample of 100 fixed bugs in the past 2 years. Go through them one by one. How many do you really seriously think would have been avoided? If it's not much more…

Ah, I think that I get that, thanks. Although to be clear, the estimates will "this is where we think that we will be saving money" followed by a review (in 12 months time) that will be "this is what we think is the result, but it will include improvements from other vectors, such as better communication from business"

Sure. This is rough engineering. If you identify a plausible significant cause, and you attack that, and you get useful improvement, people are not too likely to be overly concerned that there was some confounding factor in the improvement. If there is any excess, it's likely to be in the other direction: deciding that the likely improvement is not worth it. Engineers hate that kind of decision.

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

#184

Post by snozolli » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 8:59 AM UTC

010101010101 wrote: post #130

Trasmatta wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would rather not live my life with the sole purpose of people pleasing managers

This makes for a pithy sound bite, but that’s pretty much only possible if you’re independently wealthy to the point of being in the “fuck you money” category of wealth. There’s no part of expecting people to hand you money that doesn’t obviously lead to your sole purpose being to please those people. Even if you’re a solo contractor you’re going to spend your time pleasing clients - sure, you can shed bad ones more…

There’s no part of expecting people to hand you money that doesn’t obviously lead to your sole purpose being to please those people.

IMO, the people who need to be pleased are the customers, and, IME, management's expectations very often run contrary to those of the customers.

Turns out that anagement really doesn't like negative feedback from engineers which turns out to be echoed by users. I'd rather see career advice on how to prevent management from tanking the company without causing them to resent the engineer(s).

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

#185

Post by latchup » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 9:53 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #167

Aurornis wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Although we should notice the other side of that - managers that don't have an explicit onboarding where they lay that algorithm out for their reports are doing a terrible job. It is literally 3 lines. Lay it out at least once. Maybe go through it in a standup once a year. They are letting people slip through the cracks to the point where we have junior and even mid software engineers that don't realise there are pri…

> One of the reasons companies get dysfunctional is low- & mid-tier managers seem to be allergic to the idea of laying out what the priorities are and provide feedback on whether people are working on them or not.

Have you considered the possibility this is not a result of incompetence, but intentional? If these things are never clearly communicated and, more importantly, put in writing, management can just reframe what was agreed upon as best suits them later to deflect any blame if things go sideways. This is a perfectly rational move, since they hold all the power to do so.

I think a lot of what is wrong with this discussion is that people implicitly assume management is honest and communicates openly and sincerely. This is sadly only true in a small fraction of cases, likely because the incentives point squarely in the opposite direction: those who judge the game are always better off cheating.

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

#186

Post by rcxdude » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 9:59 AM UTC

spdionis wrote: post #150

maccard wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. I've foudn that skill never goes away no matter how far you get. The trick is as you go higher up, spotting what comes next and knowing how to solve it faster. > They get distracted, go on side quests, take too many tasks from people who aren't their manager, or avoid their manager's requests in favor of a task they find more interesting. I had a great manager when I was fresh and I watched someon…

You can go on sidequests but first you need to accumulate sufficient credibility.

This is it, pretty much. If you do your own thing and it works, then you'll come out well. If you do your own thing and it fails, you'll look bad, while if you do what yiu're asked you're going to be much safer. So if you go off-piste you should have some confidence it'll work.

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

#187

Post by latchup » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 10:23 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #76

awesome_dude wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I almost gave up SWE. My skills, abilities, and output had little to nothing to do with my career trajectory, it's only about getting higher ups to sing praises about things that I might not have even done. Add to that when a new/junior manager comes along, they're too busy trying to show everyone that they're the centre of the universe for any actual progress to be made. Edits: typos and spellchecker bei…

> it's only about getting higher ups to sing praises about things that I might not have even done. If a company is so broken that promotions are decided based on factually incorrect information, there's nothing to do other than escape to a different company. I'm talking about companies that are functioning okay, but they let the PMs drive what the team works on. A bad PM will send the entire team in the wrong directi…

> If a company is so broken that promotions are decided based on factually incorrect information, there's nothing to do other than escape to a different company.

To me, this means that every traditionally run company (top-down) must be broken by construction. And indeed, I have never seen or heard of truly fact-based management.

The entire challenge with multi-level management is that you always play a long game of telephone with increasingly less technical people, which are unable (due to lack of time and understanding) to grasp the ground-truth facts without simplification. Thus, management based on hard facts is impossible in this setting, though it is a great theoretical ideal many aspire to.

In practice, doing so is very hard and people are lazy, so the "facts" can become so twisted as to be entirely unrecognizable.

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

#188

Post by maccard » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 10:24 AM UTC

monkeyelite wrote: post #181

maccard wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. I've foudn that skill never goes away no matter how far you get. The trick is as you go higher up, spotting what comes next and knowing how to solve it faster. > They get distracted, go on side quests, take too many tasks from people who aren't their manager, or avoid their manager's requests in favor of a task they find more interesting. I had a great manager when I was fresh and I watched someon…

> spotting what comes next and knowing how to solve it faster This is such a strange mindset to me. Part of staff engineer is learning you don't need to solve tomorrow's problems. You solve it with the constraints you understand and leave room for expansion if needed. Why do we have the opposite belief organizationally? And why as a manager would you want your top workers to be speculating about things you might want…

It’s obviously way more nuanced than 2/3/5 lines of text on both sides but;

It’s not about speculating vs achieving what I’ve assigned them. It’s an over simplified example but if an engineer has two tasks to be completed that are dependent, it’s poor engineering for task A have to be re-done for task B to work (imagine an API that has ambiguity in the definition of done). A good engineer thinks just a little bit farther ahead.

At a staff+ level, 8: expect them to not only consider that but to consider “how likely is it what I’m going to have to re do this work” and scope accordingly, or to come to me and say “hey, every feature we add to service Alpha, we end up having to do XYZ to it, but with Beta we don’t”. They spend 10x more time than me writing code so they know that better than I do.

My team know my priorities, know what I value and know the areas I’m keeping an eye on. If one person is continually going on unhelpful tangents then that’s a single person issue to be handled with them directly.

YMMV with team sizes, team maturity, and where you are with your product dev.

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

#189

Post by maccard » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 10:32 AM UTC

rcxdude wrote: post #186

spdionis wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go on sidequests but first you need to accumulate sufficient credibility.

This is it, pretty much. If you do your own thing and it works, then you'll come out well. If you do your own thing and it fails, you'll look bad, while if you do what yiu're asked you're going to be much safer. So if you go off-piste you should have some confidence it'll work.

> if you go off-piste you should have some confidence it’ll work

Just remember that the definition of “working” is in the eyes of your manager. Assuming they’re competent and not pointy haired boss, then they might have different goals and priorities to you. I’d you end up diverging from them, even if what you did is technically good and a good fit for the project, you’ll probably have a bad time.

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

#190

Post by phaser » Sun, Oct 05, 2025, 11:38 AM UTC

Unfortunately and with the pain of my soul, after 10 years working in start ups, I have to admit that yes, the truth is that politics matters and matters much more than good engineering, that is something that I have learned the hard way. And it’s the only reason I’m considering leaving the game completely, as soon as I have enough economic freedom.

> 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.

I have confirmed that this is true, and a useful mental model to be successful in the world of start-ups, but also describes very well the opportunity seized by certain historic character of 1930s Europe.