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Comment by thomaspaine | Hacker News Reader

>Getting caught up in the parts of a job that don’t matter is a dangerous trap and for some reason one that a lot of people fall into. Let other people play political games and avoid them as much as you can.

My experience at big companies is the inverse. The people who advance are the ones who spend 80% of their time focused on politics, while the heads down engineer will get a thank you and inflationary raise.

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It seems to me that you have to be really good at politics in order to avoid politics. If you don’t understand politics you usually get taken advantage of. You don’t have to play the game all the time but you need to understand it.

+1. Maybe this is more important at a big company that at a startup where your business model and your tech is either good enough or it isn't. But even then you still have backers, etc.

Some people understand this stuff, and some people don't, and I don't see a lot of ways for someone who doesn't get it to become someone who gets it.

They have a lot of books on the subject. Many of the articles in eg Harvard Business Review are about it. Who knows whether someone without the natural skill will ever become great, but I am convinced it can at least be learned to competency.

I read recently being nice goes further and has more merit in California than elsewhere.

I avoid politics, but in a rapidly changing world politics often find technologists when others are on the side of resisting change.

I don’t think moving up the corporate ladder is what Altman considers to be ‘success’

Would you characterize his success since starting Loopt as being primarily about "working on things that matter" or strong relationship management and "political" skills? He managed to exit a failing startup with 5mil then get several much richer people to give him seed capital to invest (which he did fantastically) if I understand correctly. The man is clearly successful, but this type of maneuvering is definitely what I'd call "being good at politics" if you want to use that term.

A heads down, passion-driven, "no politics" founder would likely have gone down with the Loopt ship; Sam adroitly found a way to turn a failure into a success. That's politics.

No, but you need political capital even if your goal is making cool shit and not moving up the corporate ladder.

Human interaction is political - unless your work is entirely self sustaining, you have to be able to navigate the politics of human interaction. These get worse when money is involved, and all of the other competing interests at a company. I'm not saying focus on politics to the exclusion of directly productive work, but this idea that you can ignore politics and still accomplish things larger than one man projects seems incredibly naive. I don't buy for a minute that Altman hasn't engaged in plenty of politics over his career.

“I don't buy for a minute that Altman hasn't engaged in plenty of politics over his career.”

He is probably a natural at it so he doesn’t even notice that he is doing it. Reminds me a little of Steve Jobs. He was able to cut through bullshit but he was also naturally a world class bullshitter himself.

It seems like the kind of advice that's meant to correct against bad tendencies. I know people who'd spend 100% of their time on politics if they didn't control themselves, because their instinct is to resolve all personal conflicts they see.

He sold his startup at a loss to investors and walked away with millions of dollars and a plum role at YC. That’s not moving up the corporate ladder, it’s jetpacking up it.

As a technical person, you have actual work to do, and you have to keep your skills current, and then you have to go to all the meetings and provide info for the non-techs.

They on the other hand, have all their time to think and scheme on how to sell themselves and get ahead. They even have time create meetings and ask for reports.

If you are a technical person you need to be will to spend as much time as they do, and forget about your technical work. You is ok if that is what you want. Otherwise you will be in the short end of the stick.

This ignores the principle to avoid being constrained by illusionary local maxima. Why is the person still at a company where politics takes up 80% of day instead of "important" work? Although as other commentors have mentioned, climbing the corporate ladder to regional/country manager probably isn't the kind of success the author is talking abou.

Why there is politics? Because resources have to be optimized based on fuzzy future estimations and non deterministic outputs?

There is always politics but in smaller ventures its unimportant due to the bounded description of the end product and the simplicity of the teams vision.

Politics is more of an end result than a specific ooerational design of any business.

It is not that 80% is politics fir everybody but only for the decision makers with cross department visibility.

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