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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

#71

Post by whstl »

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…

Totally agree. Having good PMs (and good designers) is indeed life changing.

And I mean it, it's a change like "going home at 5PM instead of crunching to deliver every other day".

The planning and the selling of the feature make rework much less necessary, plus you can work together and define tasks in a way that are more appropriate for the current software, rather than being stuck in a hamster wheel of changes that don't really push the product forward.

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

#72

Post by marcinzm »

zwaps wrote: post #69

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 any…

I slightly disagree. Managers aiming to move up the political chain are very much happy to give political influence to those that will publicly and privately support the manager's own political goals. They want to be pushed up from below and pulled up from above. Managers that are coasting won't because they don't want competition from below.

Engineers often can't tell the two apart, and have too much ego to not publicly and privately make their manager look bad.

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

#73

Post by MarkMarine »

elevatortrim wrote: post #63
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?

They helped my ideas be “lying around” and picked from when the crisis happened.

In the source, the author says that when there is a crisis (an outage or similar) management will come to you and ask for help solving the problem and you should already have a solution ready to go. What I’ve found is that you should pre-seed your solutions with 1 pagers. Identify things that need to be improved, changes to solve tomorrow’s problems and just take the extra step of writing a 1 pager about it and circulate it. Then when the problem happens that your solution fixes, your fix is already there ready to be fully fleshed out.

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

#74

Post by Aurornis »

jcheng wrote: post #52
the_af wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is working in a small tech company any different?

It's SO different. It doesn't guarantee that life is good, but politics plays a much smaller role, especially at the very small sizes. If you're objectively awesome, the chances of you being sidelined for political reasons is pretty low when there are like 10 people in the whole company. It's just obvious to everyone who is delivering value and who is not. Conversely, if you're mediocre, there's nowhere to hide. Or m…

> but politics plays a much smaller role, especially at the very small sizes.

I thoroughly believed this after working at a small company with little politics in one of my first jobs.

But then a couple of the later small companies/startups I worked for had politics to such an insane degree that I no longer believe small companies are better or worse in general. They just have a larger variance.

The larger the company, the more the workforce trends toward the mean. When you hire 10,000 people you can't exclusively build a company of low-politics people.

With a 10-person company you technically can build that company of mostyl 1-in-100 employees who work well together. However, you could also stumble into a company where you're working with 10 people who have worked together previously and have no intention of bringing you into their inner circle. The politics at this latter type of company is truly next level hell because there's nowhere to go, unlike at a big company or FAANG where you can transfer teams or rely on your resume to get you into the application process at another company easily.

> It's just obvious to everyone who is delivering value and who is not.

In my experience at highly political small companies, this doesn't matter. The people running the political show want the upper echelon of the company to be composed of their close friends and allies. They want the people who produce to be stuck doing the grunt work.

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

#75

Post by exodust »

smallnix wrote: post #22
Trasmatta wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In case you can share an alternate strategy to make a career in a large tech company, please do, would be interested.

The alternate strategy is loyalty to "the business" rather than any particular person.

When you're invested in the success of the business above all else, and you make that known, you'll carve out a position where you're valued.

Not because you went on a "carving out your importance" mission, but because your energy goes into your work, and the details and care for the long term business objectives. Also... you can then enjoy yourself more, which opens creativity which opens innovation. Sometimes this might mean disagreeing with managers or working on stuff nobody really knows you're working on right now.

> "So if you want to get something technical done in a tech company, you ought to wait for the appropriate wave"

No. That doesn't work. You have to start building it. Don't wait.

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

#76

Post by Aurornis »

awesome_dude wrote: post #66
Aurornis wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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 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 direction and waste your time.

In the most extreme example, our PM would get distracted from the goals set by management and want us to do side quests all the time, so the entire team was constantly producing things that management didn't want while missing all of the things they wanted us to do. If your PM is the link between management and the team's directions, a bad PM will sink the team.

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

#77

Post by procaryote »

I am sure these techniques are effective; but they're disingenious and self serving.

If I see a staff engineer consistently trying to latch onto company initiatives and strategy goals to get funding for their pet project, I would like to fire them

Why not try to actually solve the issues, and spend the politics budget on making sure people noticed? Even if you failed on the politics thing you've at least done something useful

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

#80

Post by awesome_dude »

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…

I'm in Australia, and I've yet to find a company that isn't broken.
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