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Don't avoid workplace politics

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#31

Post by exmadscientist »

> 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 presents and takes credit for it, Alice might receive 1 credit point. If she presents it as Bob's work and never mentions herself, Bob will get the 1 credit point. But Alice will pick up some credit just for presenting (let's guess 0.5 unit), Bob will get the 1 point, and because Alice now manages Bob, whose stature just went up, she'll get an additional (let's guess) 0.25 point. So you've got 1.75 units of credit instead! Never be shy to give credit to others. You will benefit too!

(This is also one of the 11 Laws of Showrunning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27867023 among other links )

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#32

Post by shadowgovt »

galenmarchetti wrote: post #19
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…

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

And, indeed, perfection of the craft involves politics: it's not just understanding the technical space, it's about, eventually, understanding why other people see that space differently, what their goals are, how those goals overlap or don't, and how technical choices feed into that social layer.

Back in the day, Chrome was about a sandboxed subprocess architecture that made for a more stable browser. It was also about breaking the back of the Microsoft monopoly and advocating for why people should bother to care (remember the comic strip Google commissioned?). Nowadays, if it weren't about politics at all, Chrome would still be the best choice because it's still technically very good.

But there's more to the problem than simple technical competenece.

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#33

Post by hedgehog »

j2kun wrote: post #10

Politics is any question of the form "what should we do?" If you don't want to be involved in answering questions like that, then by all means avoid politics.

Both if you don't want to be involved in answering them and you can accept whatever answer other people come up with.

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#34

Post by eawgewag »

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 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

3. Understanding that the org cares about New Buzzword and framing your work under those pretenses.

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#35

Post by alphazard »

This is not a great take. Politics shows up as a failure to construct an aligned organization. There will always be some politics, but it should not be the most significant thing going on at a company. In a well designed org, it tends towards zero.

In a positive sum environment, with incentives aligned with the shareholders, everyone is trying to make the business more profitable, and the "more" that everyone wants comes from the market. You have to contend with reality on reality's terms to get more.

In a zero-sum environment (which is most large corporations) nothing anyone does will meaningfully move the needle on profitability. The business has been built, and now it is coasting. How to divide up the predictable profits is decided by politics, the "more" comes from someone else within the organization getting less.

The best advice is to know which environment you are in. The "right" move is entirely context dependent. If you are in a zero-sum environment, you need to play politics, that's the game. If you are in a positive-sum environment, politics will be the noise, you can get more by building more.

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#36

Post by ndriscoll »

galenmarchetti wrote: post #19
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…

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 understanding and perhaps will be able to better articulate your position. You didn't lose. You gained experience and wisdom. You always win as long as you're open to do so. The business lost by listening to the wrong person.

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#39

Post by suzdude »

scarface_74 wrote: post #11
suzdude wrote: post #5

> Now I think the opposite: politics isn’t the problem; bad politics is. And pretending politics doesn’t exist? That’s how bad politics wins. Feels like that's how extremism wins? If no one wants to confront other's political ideas, out of fear irrational responses, At least in the United States, Americans are more unified on issues than the current executive branch, or (at the very least) the largest main stream med…

This has nothing to do with the article…

Are you saying it's not applicable? Or the examples don't work?

Re: Don't avoid workplace politics

#40

Post by brightball »

This is an excellent read and the title definitely made me assume the author wasn't talking about "office politics".

What's more important than "politics" is your ability to communicate in terms that people making decisions will understand. I didn't get this nuance early in my career. I was always focused on shipping, oblivious to costs: Time Cost, Opportunity Cost, etc.

Learning to make technical decisions based on Return on Investment is the real key to bridging this communications divide.

Weighted Shorted Job First (WSJF) is an approach that will bring your team and organization into thinking that way. It works wonders for getting people on the same page and it's just an ROI formula.

WSJF = Cost of Delay / Job Size

Job Size is a proxy for cost, because it's a proxy for time...which costs money.

Cost of Delay is a fancy way of estimating how valuable something is. Technically it's "User Business Value + Time Criticality + Opportunity Enablement & Risk Reduction" but it really boils down to Value + Time Criticality. Time Criticality meaning real deadlines where the value will go away if we don't hit it by the deadline. Think conference dates or contractual obligations, not sprint commitments (wanting something sooner doesn't make it time critical).

The more prepared you are, the better the case you can make for this number while those who are unprepared will simply have to guess without anything to substantiate it.

I got deep into this philosophy after watching an exec waste resources for over a year and a half on a project that nobody wanted. When we started scrutinizing decisions with WSJF and nothing he wanted to ranked highly enough based on the math, the entire organization got better. It does wonders to eliminate the squeaky wheel problem too.

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