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How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

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

#61

Post by atomicnumber3 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #43

IMO the best you can do: - Ship often to prod (don’t do theoretical work). - Ship wins (as defined by generally acceptable metrics.) - Have someone in management or a PM who is good at selling your wins Even here, though, you will run into problems. There is always a new VP or leader looking to make an impact. Because you maintain the current systems your team is engaging in WrongThink and new VP has shiny new RightT…

I think you're absolutely correct and I think it goes one step higher level too.

As a staff engineer, it's very important to make sure people know you are not the code. The code is just a liability - as you said, it's legacy the second it hits prod.

I've found its best to position yourself not as on the side of the "code" but as a EQUAL PARTNER to leadership/product/whoever has power. It's often just a framing problem, too! You can do nearly the exact same things as if you were the BOFH. But just positioning yourself so that leaders see you as an ally in shipping product and impact, vs someone they have to bully to get approvals from on "just building the damn product." Makes it night and day.

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

#62

Post by marcinzm »

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…

I'd add:

Don't do things those with more political power than you manager don't want done unless someone with even more power publicly tells you to. That doesn't mean you do what they want done but simply that you avoid pissing them off.

Enemies are rarely worth making and the majority of managers will throw you under the bus to save their own skin in that situation.

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

#63

Post by elevatortrim »

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…

Do you mean if 1-pagers helped you get recognition and advance your career, or if they helped your ideas come to life?

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

#64

Post by marcinzm »

akudha wrote: post #35
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…

Or better options - just do the job you were hired for and go home or find that rare job (if possible) where engineering has a bigger role than politics. It is not pleasant to play a guessing game trying to please some manager, just because they’re your boss. Life is too short for stupid games

> engineering has a bigger role than politics

I've never seen two people fight to the death over something meaningless as much as some engineers do. Politics is the end product of multiple people working together with different views. Engineering doesn't save you from it. Engineers who think it does tend to cause more political turmoil in teams than anyone else.

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

#65

Post by Aurornis »

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 every time you encounter a question about what to work on or new information that might change the situation.

2. Write it down. Put it somewhere visible. Check it every morning. Remind yourself about the top priority.

3. Do the top priority until it's done. Confirm that your manager agrees that it's done when you think it's done.

It sounds simple to those of us who internalized these loops early in our careers, but some people don't see it so clearly until it's laid out for them. 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.

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

#66

Post by awesome_dude »

Aurornis wrote: post #58
softwaredoug wrote: post #43

IMO the best you can do: - Ship often to prod (don’t do theoretical work). - Ship wins (as defined by generally acceptable metrics.) - Have someone in management or a PM who is good at selling your wins Even here, though, you will run into problems. There is always a new VP or leader looking to make an impact. Because you maintain the current systems your team is engaging in WrongThink and new VP has shiny new RightT…

> - Have someone in management or a PM who is good at selling your wins Looking back on my career, one of the single biggest changes I could have made to improve my success was escaping teams with bad PMs as fast as possible. Great PMs improve everything, but they're hard to find. I spent too much time sticking around on teams where bad PMs were driving us in the wrong direction and failing to interface effectively w…

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 being too smart so words injected that didn't make sense

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

#68

Post by marcinzm »

Trasmatta wrote: post #17
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…

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

No matter what founders and managers say the reality is that 95% of tech jobs are meaningless outside the capitalistic flywheel. You're not making the world a better place. You're moving some bits around and extracting a profit from it. Pleasing a manager or pleasing the capitalistic flywheel doesn't seem much different to me.

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

#69

Post by zwaps »

There is a career book that makes a lot of good but extreme points.

One of them is: technical ability is actively detrimental to your power and career. You have to spend time and energy on actually doing things, and every competent manager will do their best to keep you right where you are, with as little political influence as possible.

Conversely, as a manager, so the book says, you want to avoid actually doing anything. You should start initiatives -as many as you can- and deftly use your political capital to either own, disown, or weaponize them. Whether they succeed in creating value is irrelevant, certainly not something you should focus on.

People focused on success and value of initiatives are still working hard when you have moved on. These people are hopelessly behind the scheming manager, eating crumbs.

And if necessary, you the manager just claim credit retroactively.

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

#70

Post by awesome_dude »

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…

Just for the record, those have intangible results. They improve maintainability, reduce vectors for bugs (which are always based on misunderstandings) and increase velocity.

Absolutely none of those can be measured (hence intangible) which is why they are a hard sell

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