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Comment by dpritchett | Hacker News Reader

I'm finding that these awkward "manipulation" skills that Adams describes are simply leverage to multiply the impact of one's technical skills within a company.

I work in the IT organization of a Fortune 100. Due to our size and modularization the skills of persuasion and influence (and consensus building, presentation skills, social skills, name recognition) are very important if I hope to have an impact here beyond that of my own code quality.

Being "right" on a technical matter is worthless if no one takes you or your ideas seriously.

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OK, but that's not value adding to the organization; it's friction that you have to overcome in order to do your main job. Your company, when it needs to do this, employs full-time specialists to do it, they're called salesmen. Not to knock your skills, but technical and presentational skills are often uncorrelated. There simply isn't time to master both. Where do you think PHBs actually come from?

It's also why huge organizations are often running obsolete technology, no-one can generate enough "activation energy" to overcome the molasses.

Excellent summary of how to be an effective programmer. In any group situation, it's not good enough to merely be right.

It's even worse than that. If you work in a large hierarchical company you can be right and be able to present your correctness in a very clear and useful way. But it is unlikely that your superior is going to allow you speak directly to his superior. That is how politics work. Which brings us back to the original article.

This is why you build a consensus. Selling your idea directly to the person in charge of making the decision is less convincing than disseminating the idea across the organization. Arrange for the superior's superior to hear it from his/her trusted associates and then hand it back down to you as a managerial directive.

As always, the only way to make someone do what you want them to do is to convince them that they want to do it because it's in their interest. Simply presenting a good idea directly to the person in charge won't be enough if the idea represents a change to entrenched organizational policies.

Right.

I was once surprised to see how many high-ranking salespeople had technical degrees like engineering or a hard science. But it makes sense -- they just struck the right balance, with enough technical knowledge to be able to talk to anyone, and then persuasion/influence skills to amplify that influence.

<waves hand> These are not the TPS reports you are looking for .....

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