Unspoken Currency of Office Politics: Leverage and Sanction Between Coworkers | Hacker News Reader

Unspoken Currency of Office Politics: Leverage and Sanction Between Coworkers

graphthinking.blogspot.com

88 pointsphysicsgraph16 comments

I avoid the word "sanction" whenever I can because it's an auto-antonym and just too confusing.

Surely, this was an oversight without oversight.

Even so, we ought to cleave to simplicity otherwise the confusion may cleaves us apart.

I see “literally” in the same light.

99% of cases it could be removed without affecting the meaning. Wish browsers could block it. Years back there was the cloud to butt add-on that replaced the word cloud or removed it. I'm just to lazy to look into it for "literally".

good idea

> This post features contributions from a coworker. Also with contributions from Gemini 2.5

Smelled it from “What's one positive action you can commit to this week?”

Well, he commented on his post the prompts: Two LLM prompts to Gemini 2.5 were used to help with the content.

> The following is a blog post. Please identify additional points of leverage and sanction in each context mentioned in the blog post.

and

> The following is a blog post. I want to make the content more engaging. I am reluctant to illustrate the points with stories, so I'm looking for other ways to make the content accessible and engaging.

Since it's mostly a list of lists and a starter text (for engagement) ... well played.

And from the bullet points and the lack of a personal perspective.

I'm glad the poster at least admitted the AI contribution, though.

I use AI a lot myself for brainstorming and perspective and even advice. But I include in my prompt details about my particular situation and needs. The responses are worth much more to me than generic listicle slop.

Thinking back to a failed role, many years ago - the articles first 'sanctions' list reads like a checklist of achievements for the situation that I blindly dug myself into while under the high stress of the time.

It took until quite a few years later to have a clearer perspective on it. Accordingly, with hindsight I wish I'd had the articles wisdom a couple of decades ago, as a preventative - though I partly wonder if I'd have had the brain structure to really take it in, back then.

Wisdom sounds like nonsense till we have the experience to digest it

Im skeptical that positive interaction between teams can exist, other than as positive interaction between their leads. It seems to me that risk/reward for an individual to blame things on a different team it too appealing to pass on.

Or maybe this is how my company has trained me to think. Everything always seems to be a different team's fault

This is why blameless postmortem culture is so critical, because in any large organization there will be blind spots due the challenges of coordinating hundreds or thousands of individuals, so if you want to even have a chance of making things better, you need to be able to talk concretely about what went wrong without getting personal. Eventually accountability does need to happen, but it needs to be grounded in technical reality and enforced by people who know what they're doing. Many organizations don't have such people (or don't have them anymore), which leads to all kinds of distortions and prioritizing covering your ass instead of making good big-picture decisions.

Clear responsibilities between the teams can help. Then you don't need to blame, the blame is in the process. "I'll be blocked on X until Y is implemented, but I can work on Z" rather than "They didn't implement Y so I can't work on X" it's pretty subtle but that's people for you. Wording (a) feels more condusive to the follow up of "or I can help with Y"

Yes, this a million times. When things get hard, shared responsibility is your responsibility.

Beautiful! People's zero points can be at very different places on these scales, and it takes a lot of effort to shift them.

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