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Comment by WantonQuantum | Hacker News Reader

I hate office politics as much as the next developer. This FT article is a very light "review" of a book called "7 Rules Of Power".

To save you time, here are the 7 rules:

1. Get out of your own way.

2. Break the rules.

3. Appear powerful.

4. Build a powerful brand.

5. Network relentlessly.

6. Use your power.

7. Success excuses almost everything you may have done to acquire power.

"Get out of your own way" means (in this book) that not showing or communicating your worth or value will leave you behind peers who do go out of their way to show their worth and value. I.e., If you keep your head down and just do good work, you won't get noticed.

So, it seems "office politics is not optional" is based on the unstated premise: "if success in the workplace is the only thing you care about."

As for me, I've been a developer for 25 years and never wanted to go into management. I love my job because I love to code and I love learning new things. I'm 100% not the target audience for this book.

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> "So, it seems office politics is not optional' is based on the unstated premise: 'if success in the workplace is the only thing you care about.'"

The FAANGs and similar corporate environments and even academia have unhealthily competitive "up or out" cultures. In those places, people are simply not allowed to not care about success or they'll get washed out because of low promotion velocity.

This isn't true at all at Google (well, wasn't, 2016-2023). The value was/is in signalling you don't care. Large portions of employees are ye olde Ivy League grad / 2nd generation wealthy. More WASP values than hacker values.

Success != Promotions

> The FAANGs and similar corporate environments and even academia have unhealthily competitive "up or out" cultures.

If given a choice between "up or out" and "up" is not what one wants to do (for whatever reasons), then "out" is the only path which might lead to happiness, as "here" is not an option allowed.

Simply untrue. FAANG would be _very_ happy to not have to promote.

FAANG is not a person. Your director is. And your director wants to empire build, which means the average count and level of the org under them must rise, partially via promotions.

I’m not sure why you came up with this statement, I’d love an explanation. Certainly people are apathetic about many things at FAANG, but they are rarely apathetic about their own career. No one is particularly happy about “coasters” (people who may or may not be coasting but aren’t playing “the game”) who are quite frankly singled out for victimization and almost everyone would rather that they quit.

Not my experience at Amazon. If an employee is performing but not growing, then their manager has some explaining to do as it is usually the case that the employee wants to grow but manager is not developing them the way they should be. I have seen plenty of cases where an employee just does not want to get promoted, the manager explains, and it’s fine.

- Your priors were correct but are newly out of date (no headcount growth since late 2021, completely new regime)

- "No one is particularly happy about “coasters”" - your word, your assertion

- quite frankly singled out for victimization and almost everyone would rather that they quit: I could see it, heard horror stories about Amazon, Google had great work/life balance. It absolutely was not expected you were busting ass for promo. Infamously you'd usually get a better grade by doing less. It was a "don't like tryhards" culture.

The post I replied to read, in part:

> ... people are simply not allowed to not care about success or they'll get washed out because of low promotion velocity.

And you state:

> Simply untrue. FAANG would be _very_ happy to not have to promote.

So how is what I wrote; "Simply untrue"? Or did you mean to reply to the GP and not me?

I was a manager in one of them. Under a certain level (which levels were called "terminal" because you could end your life there), too many "months at level" was officially deemed suspicious per the annual reviews guidelines, and subject to scrutiny and potential PIP.

Completely true. Not for all of them, but at least one.

"If given a choice between "up or out" and "up" is not what one wants to do (for whatever reasons), then "out" is the only path which might lead to happiness, as "here" is not an option allowed."

You're doing it wrong. This is about politics, not happiness. If you aren't moving up, then you're a loser like the rest of us. Have to climb for power and money.

Not entirely true, some small fraction are so satisfied and so competent at their work that they actually engage in office politics in order to not to be promoted beyond their sweet spot.

See Peter Principle, etc...

Just an annecdote, but in my last team we were all Staff SWE except one Senior. He was clearly performing at Staff level and our manager wanted to promote him (not for manager stats, but for the IC).

He (IC5) clearly was not interested. He was happy with the pay and did not want all the other BS/Responsibilities that comes with Staff.

Sadly higher ups see this as lacking ambition/motivation rather than someone knowing what they want.

Exactly. My company has official trainings for managers that explicitly states that ambition is one of the 3 main talent identifiers for the company.

> You're doing it wrong.

Perhaps I am, perhaps not. It depends on what one values I suppose.

> This is about politics, not happiness. If you aren't moving up, then you're a loser like the rest of us. Have to climb for power and money.

"Power and money" are antithetical to happiness. Ultimately, one can choose to pursue the former, the latter, or neither, but not both. Which is "better" is of course subjective and the subject of much thought by philosophers for millennia.

Choose wisely.

Once you reach terminal (IC5), promotion velocity doesn't matter. Up or out is only for IC3-4.

do they really fire someone who couldn't get to this level in N years?

Yes, the theory is that IC3/4 cost more than they produce. That being said it's really not that hard to advance at these junior levels, very little to do with politics and very much to do with becoming a competent and independently-productive engineer.

I would describe it as IC3/4s are more of a job training program for IC5, which they actually want.

Yes. I don't know how it works at other places, but at FB, according to the manager training I went through, after you were in a 'non-terminal' position beyond the time limit, they would evaluate you according to the rubric for the next level up.

Presumably, you would get bad reviews because you weren't doing the things for that level (it wasn't clear to me if you would be told that you were going to be evaluated at that level), and then you'd get on a 'performance improvement plan' and then likely terminated.

Thankfully, I wasn't a manager for long, and didn't have to see that happen.

Yet another reason to never work there.

yeah, for sure, but it's not just Google.

Facebook explicitly does, yes.

Didn’t Google change the lowest terminal level from L5 to L4 a few years ago?

Yes. Of course, each org is different, and some orgs still might expect growth at L4, even if growth = “approaching L5”.

But some orgs may be fine with terminal MI (~CME) L4s.

I mostly found it notable that it's official enough for it to be an announced change in policy. At some places the "up or out" is more of an unofficial expectation, but my understanding from Google friends is that Google literally announced to employees (around 2019 I think?) that it's ok to stay at L4 now and a promotion to L5 is no longer required to keep your job. At the time it was interpreted as a cost-saving measure, that they wanted to slow down promotion pressure to reduce salary growth. Would be curious if these terminal vs non-terminal levels are formalized at other places too?

Given that L3 is basically entry-level at Google, it also suggests that they aren't doing much up-or-out anymore. Basically you only have to get promoted once?

Having been in OLR/calibrations/etc at several FAANG and FAANG adjacent at a pretty senior level it always matters. Specifically when layoffs or top grading comes around the people with potential to advance are always more highly valued. Up and out never ends.

Also having been in FAANG calibrations, even when people are at so-called "terminal levels" the performance ratings distribution rules still become a problem.

There are often team members that are at terminal levels, not interested in promotion, but doing well relative to their level standard (i.e. performing at or near the next levels). Those team members often won't be happy with a "meets" rating and still expect a rating and bonus multiplier above "meets."

Meanwhile, had they been promoted, they'd probably be a solid "meets" and another team member that wants/deserve a promotion needs those above-meets ratings too.

Ratings distributions usually aren't bound to just one single level, nor are they done with all levels as a single bucket, but within certain level groups, having a terminal level + rating distribution shaping is an issue.

been FAANG adjacent a few times, but in several of F500s, and in different industries/verticals.

no "official" up-or-out in any of those, but definitely a thing in all of them. at a mid-to-senior level or above you're getting paid -- not FAANG pay, but in most cases pretty solid -- and you need to justify your existence. If you're not getting "atta-boys" on the regular then you're gonna get chopped.

One place fired all of the Architects, for example, because they felt they didn't really do much. Three quarters of "what does this team do to deliver" and they were gone.

Yeah, delivering on expectations for your current level is a given requirement. That's very different from "up or out."

Have seen this and later experienced it. Not going to go into anecdotes / details.

I heard my company tries to push out people with low promotion velocity. I'm 12 years in with only 1 promotion. I'm the lowest velocity. I'm too stubborn (scared of finding a new job with a disability) to push out though.

Indeed, "up or out" turns friends into rivals, prevents teamwork. Coworkers hoard info to prevent you looking too good compared to them. As result you can struggle to learn anything without being pushy or playing politics. If someone's doing a great job at work and they want to "coast" and do the same great job next year, seems good to me. But apparently not allowed in those up or out places. To anyone that finds that happening at work, my advice is GTFO. ;). ( I worked at place like this once. Happily managed to find a much nicer place to work after a year-and-a-half of it)

Was trying to find a way to reply to your comment about my book.

But yes, I wrote a scifi novel about a computer hacker and occasionally post it here. Calling me a "shill" for trying to promote my book seems harsh.

Have you ever tried to accomplish anything in your life? How would you suggest a new author gets their work outlet there?

Your account has been around long enough that you should be amply familiar with the HN guidelines linked at the bottom of the page, particularly the one about not using HN for promoting your own products. However, if you believe that your post has been unfairly flagged, you may contact the site moderators, whose email address is also in the guidelines, and make your case to them.

As an aside, I also think this explains the "bamboo ceiling" phenomenon. South asian culture is comfortable with self-promotion--my dad taught me most of these rules from a young age--in a way I get the impression east asian culture maybe looks down upon. That plays out when you look at who is in management. So if you're an engineer (from any background) who wants to move up, consider reading this book.

People who are constantly asserting their own value are definitely looked down upon by a whole lot of their peers. If that's what you mean by "comfortable with self-promotion," it's a double-edged sword.

Your peers don’t make promotion decisions.

Generally true, but not if they start their own companies.

Your bosses notice this too.

EDIT: not you personally,sorry.

In any case, I sit in promo discussions all the time and self-promoting behavior has the unintended effect of driving greater scrutiny.

It's a showing vs telling thing, isn't it? Don't just tell everyone you're awesome; show people the cool/challenging work you've done.

> So, it seems "office politics is not optional" is based on the unstated premise: "if success in the workplace is the only thing you care about."

> As for me, I've been a developer for 25 years and never wanted to go into management. I love my job because I love to code and I love learning new things. I'm 100% not the target audience for this book.

Agreed. I think it's also a false dichotomy that you either have to "play the game" or "not play the game"; as most things, how much you want to "play the game" is a spectrum, and there's definitely merit in picking your battles. I ultimately don't care enough about most technical decisions in the products I've worked on to try to outmaneuver someone else who's trying to play politics, but if someone is actively politicking to try to affect _me_ specifically rather than the product, I'm not likely to stand by and let it happen rather than try to influence things. It's useful to be able to understand how office politics work from defensive perspective even if you don't plan to actively utilize it.

I think some of the debate here is that politics is always happening to you, you have no choice but to play the game. You can be passive or active, you are just choosing to be passive but you're still playing.

So, if you don't want to play it's still better to know the rules.

I feel like you can still gain a lot of respect by loving to code. For one, if you're impactful enough your name will be all over your company's git repositories in commits. You'll have your name in documentation. A lot of newer employees will remember your mentoring. That in itself all earns you valuable respect.

Perhaps it's not the same as making sure the CEO knows that you made this piece of software, and did this thing, and that thing... but it does make its way there in a healthy organization.

“For one, if you're impactful enough your name will be all over your company's git repositories in commits”

Or… you’re a busy body that likes to move files around and pretty things up leaving your name on the blame and making it look like you did a ton of work. All you did was open it/save it in VIM.

Let’s not praise false indicators. Lines of code isn’t a good measurement of quality, nor is lines committed.

Not necessarily.

The dude who probably had the most commits at our org was just chosen as the sacrificial lamb of the development team's share of cost cutting. Now I have no opinion of his work personally due to working separately and I generally thought highly of him as a person, but he was considered by some to be responsible for one of the most significant engineering f-ups in the history of the org. It is generally true that traumatic events resonate more deeply with people than positive ones. So you can quietly commit code all day everyday, but if your mistakes are more visible than your successes then you won't go far.

If you do 10x the work and fuck up at the same rate as everyone else, you will do 10x the fuck ups and they will just remember you as the guy who fucked up things all the time even though you didn't fuck up proportionally more than anyone else.

I think this is the real reason some people hop companies every other year. They never have to be confronted by the result of past poor decisions.

That’s one reason. Another reason is they’re struggling at home and need to earn more. Or that they think they were worthy of that promotion they were passed up for. Or perhaps is was because they got stiffed a Christmas bonus.

Don’t assume you know someone’s motives.

You zeroed in on one of the things I mentioned. You didn't consider the mentorship, writing documentation, or just general product ownership over time.

Of course, if your organization considers a firm handshake and constant eye contact more important than being a competent engineer, so be it.

Often those things happens outside of git src tree. Confluence or readthedocs in another process that gets completely overlooked by management’s “velocity calculator”.

> I feel like you can still gain a lot of respect by loving to code. For one, if you're impactful enough your name will be all over your company's git repositories in commits. You'll have your name in documentation.

None of these things garner respect, as respect is earned from people.

> A lot of newer employees will remember your mentoring.

That is where respect resides.

> That in itself all earns you valuable respect.

How one interacts with, helps, and/or mentors people is what alone earns "valuable respect." An informal conversation with someone wanting to learn, resulting in a book recommendation, is far more impactful than a few commits.

>"Get out of your own way" means (in this book) that not showing or communicating your worth or value will leave you behind peers who do go out of their way to show their worth and value. I.e., If you keep your head down and just do good work, you won't get noticed.

My last job, I was out of the office the vast majority of the time. I was working 50-60 hour weeks.

There wasnt enough time to sell myself to my boss. I did work out of the office with sales guys and the ceo quite often so I did sell to them. They loved me.

I would get back into the office and it was like everyone was caught up in a battle with each other. I tried my best to stay out of it, but you get drawn into that shit so quickly.

Specifically, there was a senior sysadmin who knew nothing about networking at war with the network admin. I was the only other network admin, so naturally I get drawn into it. So I would help out there to help him avoid that conflict. Then on multiple occasions I did the network work, but the other network admin thought the sysadmin did and started saying how bad of a job he did. But it was me...

Then the dreadful day where I was booked 4-6 weeks in advanced and there was work needed to be done. So they brought this other network admin in on my clients. Totally fine with me to have less on my plate. But then I get a phone call from my client telling me the network admin badmouthed me the entire time he was there. I got that recorded, provided it to HR. HR then said they cant just fire him because then I'd be the last network admin and im overloaded with work. They then let me in on something I shouldn't know. He also has another fireable offence being hateful toward a lesbian peer. She was awesome, no idea why he had a fued with her.

So I left the harassment complaint with HR. But like 3 days later my boss who rarely speaks with me comes into my office to tell me that the other network admin went through my tickets and found many problems. I stopped him there, i told him that that other network admin is harassing me, that i'm making it official now and he has to do something about it.

The next morning I got fired.

That escalated quickly, if HR had a "file" on the other guy, what was the cause of firing?

Did your manager like the other guy more? Also why does it matter that the peer was a lesbian?

>That escalated quickly, if HR had a "file" on the other guy, what was the cause of firing?

the other guy never got fired. He about a month later found a new job and they were left with 40 sysadmins and 0 net admins.

As for my firing's reason, "No longer need my services"

>Did your manager like the other guy more?

No, not at all lol. Said boss had gone off on him multiple times, even knew he was looking for a new job.

But that's the thing with harassment, you really don't know what's true and what people think of you. Having been tainted by the harasser illegitimately.

So for all I know I was the worsest person on earth?

>Also why does it matter that the peer was a lesbian?

Sorry, unmentioned part. He was pretty christian and straight up told her she's going to hell for being a lesbian. While also making her life hell in terms of getting work done.

As someone who started at a big four firm 8 years ago in cyber consulting, a lot of this rings true outside of programming.

Especially the part about not showing or communicating your worth or value will leave you behind.

I was the worker who kept their head down, did good work and built good networks with people around me early on in my career. I got a lot of feedback through 1:1 discussions that said "You do great work and particular people know that, but other people with influence don't".

You don't need to be a dick and push others around to show your value, but speaking up, being supporting of others openly and contributing in other areas help show people who you are.

All of this needs to be wrapped up under leaders who support growth.

While everything past 1 is cut-throat garbage, I'm not convinced that communicating what you've been doing is actually useless to the rest of the company. If you don't bullshit and just present your work then it's a good way for management to learn why projects went well/poorly, and a good way for you to organise your own thoughts and your stream of work.

There's a basic level of self-promotion - demos, emails, talks to other engineers or users about how to use the new thing you made, retrospective write-ups of failed projects - below which you're not telling other people enough about what you did.

some of these rules sound like euphemisms for backstabby lickspittle who's biggest expertise is resembing an expert.

It's wild to me that folks seem to be unable to figure out how to fix rot at large companies when this is such a toxic set of trials for selecting people to put in power

Society can't figure out how to stop the most toxic, corrupt and incompetent people from becoming high ranking politicians so it makes perfect sense for the same kind of rot to be endemic at large corporations.

Rotten people gravitate towards power and most of those who aren't rotten are cowards who won't do anything to stop them because that'd risk their own careers or their own relationships with people naive enough to fall for the rotten people who are climbing towards the top. The only thing that fixes this is for a critical mass of people to find the courage to stand up to rotten individuals who are powerful or likely to obtain power soon.

> The only thing that fixes this is for a critical mass of people to find the courage to stand up to rotten individuals who are powerful or likely to obtain power soon.

Or you know, competition from new companies that will replace them. So companies can't rot too much, they have to continue to provide at least a bit of value or get replaced.

The reason is more often than not it just cannot be fixed. Only way to fix it is to fundamentally start fresh.

I feel like with the level of surveillance we point at ad targeting, if we just steered it in the right direction it would provide at least some clue in sussing out who is power gaming versus people who are earnestly trying to do good for the team

On a personal level I've developed a sense for when someone tends toward these behaviors, like when they downplay the contribution of someone who actually did work while promoting their "direction" which happened outside of recorded history

The ones that are most fit for power may be the ones to least desire it, in which case they don't make any effort to get there...

If one cannot get rid of power concentration (e.g. by subsistence or federation) then democracy's playbook seems best (voting, transparency, checks and balances) or even random selection.

There is nothing special about the office, it is just a reflection on humans and general socities/governments.

We like to pretend it's different and meritocracy has more value, but the same rules of politics are involved (corporate vs government).

So, I disagree, deomcracy's playbook will yield the same results as the same actors are playing the game.

Well, my point being to change the rules of the game such that even if everyone is assumed to greedily (i.e. first order) optimize for their own goals this cannot easily cause the organization to rot.

A very simple application of this is the worker's council/Betriebsrat (though this one too can get infected by politics depending on implementation).

It's certainly a highly non-trivial issue and details matter a lot...

If you start a company, how do you avoid anyone trying to practice those 7 "rules" and BS-ify your company?

When some individuals do try this BS, can you correct or eject them fast enough, or is it inevitable that they take over?

Does BS-ification always start bottom-up, top-down, or it varies?

Is there a point at which a company as an entity consciously chooses BS for its operations (such as because there's a superior net result, or non-BS is deemed intractable or is not understood)?

Keep the headcount under the Dunbar number and be the only boss.

I think this is the only answer here. If you want to keep control you have to keep the number low enough to see all the pieces being played.

This doesn't stop the game from playing, but if you are founder/CEO you have more ability to shape.

Use tools to help workers estimate their contribution. Basically try to automate performance evaluation. You can't completely, but you can give bullshitters less opportunity to embellish.

And like the other commenter said, keep the company as small as possible. That way, each person's contribution is more prominent.

> [...] productivity measurement [...] analytics [...] workers estimate their contribution [...] automate evaluation [...]

Won't this inevitably lead to the same familiar BS?

We already know that current tech workers start focusing on corporate BS metrics (e.g., FAANG interviews) while still in school.

Even getting into the college was its own gauntlet of BS of resource-intensive hoop-jumping, questionable metrics, artifice, and self-promotion.

CS students have already been told how to strategically pick their first job, how to work promotions, when to job-hop, to have no loyalty to project and team, to network, to self-promote, etc.

By the time tech workers hit their first job, they've practically been engineered and filtered to be corporate BS machines.

Part of the trick might be to un-train that. And to filter for people who can be un-trained.

Don't use BS metrics, then; try to estimate long-term value. Hire an organizational economist.

Companies have been trying to do aligned metrics for a long time.

And economists have been pulling theories out of their posteriors for a long time.

I think this is still barking up the same BS tree.

> Use tools to help workers estimate their contribution.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Is that true if your target is estimated long-term revenue?

How do you measure that for an individual worker?

You don't measure it; you model and estimate it. That's why I said "hire an organizational economist". It's a complex problem. The estimate would be fuzzy, but that's a given.

One major way to keep this out of your company is to come up with an interview process that can't be gamed or BSed. I suspect that people who are good at gaming their way through interviews are also likely to BS-ify your company.

I cringe a little reading that list, but I do think people should spend time thinking about, and communicating their worth.

I'm in games development, and many years ago when I worked in a big studio we used to do these Friday afternoon meetings where people would stand up and show off the best work they did during the week.

The artists would show off a cool new character model, or a programmer might show how the pathfinder improved, or some nice new animation blending.

I'm sure some people hated it, but I think it was really great for the whole team to sit around and congratulate each other for what was achieved that week.

How different is this from, Be an open and optimistic communicator, exploit opportunities vigorously as they arise, show confidence in your track record and your thinking -- for the good of yourself and the business? In other words, "office politics" does not have to be odious.

> success in the workplace

Even that can be so many different things. Measured how - title? Number of underlings? Number of committees? Money?

Money, and interesting problems to work on.

In my experience there's a few that are critical:

Getting the funnest projects

Getting reasonable flexibility in hours or days

Not being the garbage disposal, meaning you are allowed to work on important, not necessarily urgent things

Etc

These do require politics and reputation management. But much of it is being reliable and asking for what you want, but doing what you're given.

The rest, a non-negligible amount, comes from the active steps listed on GP.

Power, money, influence.

What you consider success is up to you. The criteria you listed may matter to you or they may be other peoples’ criteria of success.

Perhaps success for you is “known as important enough that I’m never on the layoff list”. And “get to spend time with my family; can avoid the death march programs”.

> "Get out of your own way" means (in this book) that not showing or communicating your worth or value will leave you behind peers who do go out of their way to show their worth and value. I.e., If you keep your head down and just do good work, you won't get noticed.

The best business advice I ever received came in a dream in which All Might (from My Hero Academia) told me: "If you want to succeed and get recognized at work, you must let your company know: 'I am here!'"

Agreed, for most of us those games are optional, But "good" people still need to play, and play well. When they don't we get 21st century Boeing

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