Don't avoid workplace politics

When Jeff Hodges gave a presentation of his "Notes on Distributed Systems for Youngbloods"[1] at Lookout Mobile Security back in like 2014 or 2015, he did this really interesting aside at the end that changed my perception of my job, and it was basically this. You don't get to avoid "politics" in software, because building is collaborative, and all collaboration is political. You'll only hurt yourself by avoiding leveling up in soft skills.

No matter how correct or elegant your code is or how good your idea is, if you haven't built the relationships or put consideration into the broader social dynamic, you're much less likely to succeed.

[1] https://www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distrib...

> 5. Being visible. If you do great work but nobody knows about it, did it really happen? Share your wins, present at all-hands, write those design docs that everyone will reference later.

And don't forget that when managers or seniors are involved, there's magic alchemy that comes from spreading the credit around. Suppose Bob works under Alice and Bob, mostly solely, accomplishes something significant. If Alice presents and takes credit for it, Alice might receive 1 credit point. If she presents it as Bob's work and never mentions herself, Bob will get the 1 credit point. But Alice will pick up some credit just for presenting (let's guess 0.5 unit), Bob will get the 1 point, and because Alice now manages Bob, whose stature just went up, she'll get an additional (let's guess) 0.25 point. So you've got 1.75 units of credit instead! Never be shy to give credit to others. You will benefit too!

(This is also one of the 11 Laws of Showrunning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27867023 among other links )

"Think about the last time a terrible technical decision got pushed through at your company. Maybe it was adopting some overcomplicated architecture, or choosing a vendor that everyone knew was wrong, or killing a project that was actually working. I bet if you dig into what happened, you’ll find it wasn’t because the decision-makers were stupid. It’s because the people with the right information weren’t in the room."

Well, it's a decent article, but that paragraph does not match my experience. In my experience, it's typically because there's a non-technical reason why the technical decision was done badly:

1) devs, or their supervisors, or both want Hot New Thing on their resumes

2) in order to get Good New Thing purchased, the Old Bad Thing must be shown to be unworkable, so saving Old Bad Thing with a clever solution is undesirable

3) org needs a system using New Buzzword, to show to VC's or others, and this is the opportunity to use New Buzzword, whether it makes sense here or not

None of these are reasons that I like, but they are also reasons that are very convincing to most people, especially high-ranking decision makers.

I don't mean to suggest that the articles points like "Building relationships before you need them", etc. aren't a good idea. Just don't expect it to have a very high success rate in winning debates about "terrible technical decisions".

This is not a great take. Politics shows up as a failure to construct an aligned organization. There will always be some politics, but it should not be the most significant thing going on at a company. In a well designed org, it tends towards zero.

In a positive sum environment, with incentives aligned with the shareholders, everyone is trying to make the business more profitable, and the "more" that everyone wants comes from the market. You have to contend with reality on reality's terms to get more.

In a zero-sum environment (which is most large corporations) nothing anyone does will meaningfully move the needle on profitability. The business has been built, and now it is coasting. How to divide up the predictable profits is decided by politics, the "more" comes from someone else within the organization getting less.

The best advice is to know which environment you are in. The "right" move is entirely context dependent. If you are in a zero-sum environment, you need to play politics, that's the game. If you are in a positive-sum environment, politics will be the noise, you can get more by building more.

> Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either above humanity, or below it; he is the ‘Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,’ whom Homera denounces — the outcast who is a lover of war; he may be compared to a bird which flies alone.

Sure, Aristotle wasn't talking about corporations, but as the author says "you can refuse to participate, but that doesn’t make it go away," you shouldn't be a bird which flies alone.

This is an excellent read and the title definitely made me assume the author wasn't talking about "office politics".

What's more important than "politics" is your ability to communicate in terms that people making decisions will understand. I didn't get this nuance early in my career. I was always focused on shipping, oblivious to costs: Time Cost, Opportunity Cost, etc.

Learning to make technical decisions based on Return on Investment is the real key to bridging this communications divide.

Weighted Shorted Job First (WSJF) is an approach that will bring your team and organization into thinking that way. It works wonders for getting people on the same page and it's just an ROI formula.

WSJF = Cost of Delay / Job Size

Job Size is a proxy for cost, because it's a proxy for time...which costs money.

Cost of Delay is a fancy way of estimating how valuable something is. Technically it's "User Business Value + Time Criticality + Opportunity Enablement & Risk Reduction" but it really boils down to Value + Time Criticality. Time Criticality meaning real deadlines where the value will go away if we don't hit it by the deadline. Think conference dates or contractual obligations, not sprint commitments (wanting something sooner doesn't make it time critical).

The more prepared you are, the better the case you can make for this number while those who are unprepared will simply have to guess without anything to substantiate it.

I got deep into this philosophy after watching an exec waste resources for over a year and a half on a project that nobody wanted. When we started scrutinizing decisions with WSJF and nothing he wanted to ranked highly enough based on the math, the entire organization got better. It does wonders to eliminate the squeaky wheel problem too.

Everything has a sales component, good engineering doesn't automatically sell itself. In that respect, I agree some of what's called politics here is always necessary.

On the other hand, I've worked at places where the only way to get ahead is to be a smarmy political operator and do no real work (I find this common when there is no exposure to a real market so no objective standard of what is the right direction to take). It's better to just leave such organizations.

This is what I always try to emphasize to the junior guys I've worked with. I read the book Flowers for Algernon when I was younger and it was the thing that stood out to me the most.

It does not matter how right you are if no one likes or will listen to you. Unfortunately, being likeable is inifinitely more important than being right. Your job is to strike a balance between both otherwise stupid likeable people will be dictating the direction.

Politics is any question of the form "what should we do?"

If you don't want to be involved in answering questions like that, then by all means avoid politics.

Not that I disagree with the article, but I wish the title was clarified to office politics.

I clicked hoping to find am argument to the engineering community at large to recognize the political aspects of our work.

Although I guess the basic argument still applies.

I find being outspoken is a great way to be heard and visible, but if I'm being honest my entire personality is confrontational.

I share my opinions, accomplishments, and (most importantly) my failures. This tends to make me a default leader in conversations, and I try really hard not to be overbearing.

ADHD + outspoken = confrontational / obnoxious.

On some level this is just a technicality. When people talk about politics they almost always talk about bad politics because good politics doesn’t feel like politics. It just feels like things are working correctly.

"Think about the last time a terrible technical decision got pushed through at your company. Maybe it was adopting some overcomplicated architecture, or choosing a vendor that everyone knew was wrong, or killing a project that was actually working. I bet if you dig into what happened, you’ll find it wasn’t because the decision-makers were stupid. It’s because the people with the right information weren’t in the room."

This stands in stark contrast to the genai, ai-first nature of every company today.

In fact, almost every point made in this article is completely wrong from my experience in FAANG. It's almost always, 'my way or the highway' from leadership. Jump aboard or get left behind.

"The alternative to good politics isn’t no politics. It’s bad politics winning by default. It’s the loud person who’s wrong getting their way because the quiet person who’s right won’t speak up. It’s good projects dying because nobody advocated for them."

- again, genai - Amazon RTO - Meta's metaverse forray. - etc.

I think the problem here is the implication of the term "politics". We've been conditioned (at least in the US) to think of politics as a tribalistic "us vs. them" activity where interactions have winners and losers.

The classic picture of "office politics" is about either damaging reputations with gossip or getting special treatment because of who you know instead of what you know.

But this depiction strikes me as less about that dirty version of politics and more about simply accepting that social grease is important in an organization. Teamwork is important. Crafting the message to the recipient is important. Inclusiveness and a shared sense of ownership is important. Culture is important.

I detest and refuse to engage in tribalism - workplace or otherwise. But I 100% believe in the stuff from the previous paragraph.

> Share your wins, present at all-hands

Please don't. I'm sick of watching your Power Points.

> But they’re not willing to do what it takes to influence those decisions.

This is true, and it remains true for me after reading your article.

I 100% agree that your approach is an effective way to move your organization forward, but one teeny weeny detail you're omitting is that if you continue to do this you will no longer be an individual contributor and will instead be management. You will gradually cede all of your time to this cause of championing good ideas and will have no time left for doing any of the work yourself.

I think most of the so-called cynics know the role of politics. It's not that they are ignorant, it's that they want their management to take care of it.

Reading some comments here on the one hand makes me feel safe, because seems like a lot of tech people do not understand what power is and why it matters, so someone that does can feel little bit more secure. One the other hand makes me pessimistic, because it confirms what I thought for a long time - nothing will happen to improve those important, society-wide topics (FOSS, privacy, personal computing), because... tech people do not understand what power is and why it matters.

Should be titled Stop Avoiding Workplace Politics?

It’s not a discussion of the toxic political environment we live in today.

I don't think this is "politics" but even if it technically is, the term has such negative connotations that I think we're better off approaching the scenarios from a different angle, rather than trying to rescue "politics". Start by telling yourself "I will assume the best in motivations and most charitable interpretation." Now approach the "Why?" like a cultural anthropologist: How did we get here? What clues can I find that explain the current state? What artifacts are out there? How is communication organized? What's the hierarchy structure? Who or what are notable influences? Talk to lots of people. Ask lots of open questions. Listen. Sketch literal and conceptual diagrams of "how this all works".

It's likely to turn out everyone is NOT an idiot and there are very logical & understandable reasons for why things are the way they are. Or not, in which case you can run away secure that you've made the right conclusion.

1 office politics tip for engineers: engineers are helpful people, people who believe in putting in hard work now because future benefits.

office politicians believe in focusing on politics (relationships) and putting their name on as much progress as possible and getting facetime with higher ups.

watch for it in meetings: do not accept work assigned to you by a peer, push back on the boss going along with a peer assigning you work, and do not accept a peer volunteering to do the presentation while you get started on grunt work. that person is planning to "coordinate" your work and put s/he's name on it and give the presentation to higher ups.

you do the presentation, you talk to higher ups. somebody wants to help? they need to take their share of the grunt work, earn their way in like you did.

> It’s because the people with the right information weren’t in the room.

You can often disprove this idea by just asking about the decision. The objections are often raised. That doesn't mean people take them seriously.

People have all sorts of strange biases and irrationality.

"The Rules for Rulers"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

"The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics" (2022, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith)

https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...

Both publications cover the politics of most firms with stakeholders. =3

Great post. I’d just take it a step further and point out that this doesn’t stop at software or work.

A person can not “not be in politics”. You can only choose to have politics that affect you happen without your input. That’s how you end up with bad governments (in your mind).

The most important thing to learn about passivity is that it’s not a neutral position of exclusion. It is an active choice to not participate and be at the receiving end of the outcome.

It's a very common situation at work - if two team members have serious difference of opinion, the manager, instead of looking into the matter or taking sides, asks both to duel it out and come out with an agreed solution. Manager doesn't care about who is right and not willing to take the risk of judging. Easier for manager to is just let them fight it out.

In reality, the manager already has a perception for both and knows the outcome. The team is aware of that perception, and would not dare to correct it or give a surprise because that is not going to benefit them. Bosses don't like their hard-earned perceptions being corrected. No surprises please. The weaker would realize this perceptional power and bow out even if their view point has merit. Manager would thank both for sorting it out.

You can't engage in gladiator fights against bad and powerful people. You are more likely to hurt yourself than influencing the decisions. The audience may clap and encourage the fight, but they are not completely neutral.

Each person gains their power by perception (from their boss or co-workers). They can use this power to shut you off. So, from an individual perspective, you need to choose what's best for you based on how powerful you are. Simply getting into politics without such assessment is foolish.

The whole point of collaboration is to build the perceptional power. Also, being in higher position keeps you in loop for all communication giving you more access to the on-goings and opportunity to get visibility. This increases the perceptional power.

People hoard information. It's a treasure and sometimes their whole career depends on keeping it as secret. Also people hoard work items. Just having a long queue of work also gives power. Atleast you have a lot to talk about and possibly grow your team.

The article makes a very astute point. If you don't engage in politics, those who do will call the shots and lead the company down the wrong path.

Also, in my experience, it's generally true that the people who don't like engaging in politics are often better at making good decisions which benefit the group. They tend to be more logical and more team-focused; less emotional and less self-centered. This probably explains a lot of our political problems.

> Politics is just how humans coordinate in groups.

"Politics" is the word we use to refer to coordination mechanisms.

> Think about the last time a terrible technical decision got pushed through at your company.

There were other interlinked concerns that were more important. "Yes that probably would be better, except that it's not consistent with what we've told the auditors. So it's not happening."

.

> Stop Avoiding Politics

Not everyone needs to stick their oar in on every decision.

The title says “don’t avoid politics”. Then the content says “what you think is politics is bad politics”, so instead the author suggests how to do good politics.

Let’s apply the same structure to another important area of human relations: marriage. “Don’t be in a bad marriage — here’s how a good marriage looks like”.

Sounds great as a writing exercise. Unclear how applicable it is in most of people’s real life circumstances.

"Politics is just how humans coordinate in groups. It’s the invisible network of relationships, influence, and informal power that exists in every organization. You can refuse to participate, but that doesn’t make it go away. It just means decisions get made without you."

This is how I feel, and this is what I tell people when they don't want to get involved in the organization's politics.

If you want to do great work, that usually happens in environments with minimized politics.

It's probably bad career advice to completely avoid politics (most places aren't doing great work) but it depends on what you're optimizing for.

The problem with everyone getting into the political game is that then we have everyone talking and noone building.

The HN title "what good workplace politics looks like in practice" is less clear than the article's actual title (and, the article's actual point), "Stop avoiding politics"

This isn't an article about improving organizations, this is an article about getting what you want within an organization by getting better at playing politics.

The author presents two options: think you’re above politics, or practice it. I admit that, when I was younger, I did believe the first for a while, but what it progressed to was an option C: accept that politics, in some form, is necessary and affects me, then choose to spend as much of my life as possible on other things. If politics is necessary then boy is farming necessary, yet I’m not a farmer. Medicine is necessary, yet I’m not a doctor; defense is necessary, yet I’m not a soldier. These jobs are entrusted to others. We live in a highly specialized society, with which comes the gift of being free to choose beautiful things to feed our limited life energy to, and the curse of being ineffectual in any area we sacrifice little for. Because we’ll be consistently outperformed by those who give more to that area, and less to every other endeavor and principle.

Sometimes, in both workplaces and countries, we enter a state in which we’re forced to feed more of ourselves to the beast. The state’s name is desperation. It’s a tragic state, like reversion to a society in which we spend all our time finding food. People in such a state can’t create science or art.

Book Recommendation: High Conflict by Amanda Ripley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE_MEu7xn8Y

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1982128569

> I bet if you dig into what happened, you’ll find it wasn’t because the decision-makers were stupid. It’s because the people with the right information weren’t in the room.

Or, the people with the decision making power just had a different opinion made a decision irrespective of "right information"

Beware of corporate cultures that encourage employee/teammate feedback and provide mechanisms for collecting it anonymously (often a function of HR software).

Anonymous feedback is almost always destructive, the exception being when the leaders of large organizations seek employee sentiment.

Great essay. And it's true about all politics. Power will always rest somewhere. You want it to rest with people who know what they're doing, and who care about other people, and are very uncomfortable about the idea of power for its own sake.

All life is politics, and workspaces are not politics exempt. The world we live in understandably makes many cynics. Yes, still we want no kings, and more politics in and out of our workspaces.

> Now I think the opposite: politics isn’t the problem; bad politics is. And pretending politics doesn’t exist? That’s how bad politics wins.

Feels like that's how extremism wins? If no one wants to confront other's political ideas, out of fear irrational responses,

At least in the United States, Americans are more unified on issues than the current executive branch, or (at the very least) the largest main stream media outlet would have you believe. It'd be great if people worked at the center, dealing with outcomes. There's far too much talking past each other, as people stand on their mountain of comfortable points, far too many who ignore evidence as soon as it does not conform to their world view.

As long as more than two people (3+) are involved, it is politics.

Politics here is collaboration. Example given on tool selection seems like lacked good engineering and oversight in terms of trade studies or boards found in larger orgs.

nah, I don't care about my employer's suboptimal decisions enough, I'll just collect a paycheck and if let go I just close that laptop and wait for the shipping instructions.

let them careen off a cliff, the cash in your bank account matters. we get paid enough not to care. just buy LEAPs on VOO or a hot sector's ETF, its literally that easy.

in my experience this take has gotten me promoted, sometimes I take it. cash cash cash.

GPTzero says 99% AI generated. But I want to comment, this is something I learnt early on in my career.

Early in my career our boss let us drink at work. He knew most work was done in the morning and so he allowed us to drink in the afternoon. Worked fine up until someone was having a bad home life and got smashed at work. Then drunk drove to a client and the client realized he was drunk. I wasnt privy to what happened with that, but then we lost the ability to drink.

Not a problem for me... I rarely drank. Everyone else went on a quiet strike. The boss was a huge prick micromanager, the guys wanted to quit because it changed things; but they simply stopped doing work. Every ticket was created and then sent to the queue. Bare minimum got worked on. Months go by and the strike quietly lifted. The drunk guy found a new job.

Months later at lunch they were trying to convince me to get drinking back; but they were trying to manipulate me. They were playing a power game to do it.

So I "fall" into their trap and go talk to the boss. argue about the 5 monkeys, that leave the rule of no drinking in place but turn a blind eye to it. The boss was like 'why do you even care, you dont drink with them." he didnt even let me answer before he realized what was happening.

>Now I think the opposite: politics isn’t the problem; bad politics is. And pretending politics doesn’t exist? That’s how bad politics wins.

Backstabbing, power structures that arent immediately obvious. But negativity is easier and especially effective when you just let bad politics win.

Trying to stay positive or out of politics is the right way.

>It just means decisions get made without you.

Yep. I'm finding myself in one of these right now. Im just staying out of it. Decisions are being made to punish me.

>Good politics is just being strategic about relationships and influence in the service of good outcomes.

This is what this AI article gets wrong. The 'bad politics' people think they are getting 'good outcomes' and if you play politics, you also think you're getting 'good outcomes' but how do you measure 'good'?

>They want a world where technical merit alone determines outcomes. That world doesn’t exist and never has.

Sure it does. This exists in the successful. Politics is what kills companies.

Unfortunately most corporate politics is dominated by those who do it professionally

There is a saying "People are politics. How can you avoid people?".

I think this article misses the point. I don't think many engineers are averse to collaborating, advocating for their work and using soft skills. Politics also entails lots of complex human relationships - favoritism, rivalries, jealousy, egomania etc. these play out in different ways in different orga depending on how people and teams are incentivised and arranged. But the net result for the engineer trying to navigate this is can be a lot of wasted energy and frustration. Not always of course, and some orgs really don't have as much of a problem. I suspect it's more common in larger orgs with a traditional corporate culture.

Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but I remember that there used to be times when slop like this (and some other similar stop I've recently seen getting posted in here) was just not a thing, at least not at this level. I mean, this is really sloppy, it doesn't mean anything and a lot of things at the same time, it doesn't mention anything concrete.

> Ideas don’t speak. People do. And the people who understand how to navigate organizational dynamics, build relationships, and yes, play politics? Their ideas get heard.

he’s pushing for ‘office politics’ not national politics.

> Stop pretending you’re above politics. You’re not. Nobody is. The only question is whether you’ll get good at it or keep losing to people who already are.

False. You do not lose if you do not play. You can offer your expertise/opinions and point out places where things could be improved, but at the end of the day, just treat work as someone paying for your time. If you've advised them on how to best make use of that time, and they want to do something else, well it's their money.

I disagree with the OP.

This is my rebuttal about the nuance of being an employee.

An engineer avoids "politics" - as a vital protection mechanism against getting himself fired.

Often autistic ( my case ), technical, hard working, constantly exposed to poor decisions, lies, manipulations. The one thing the engineer can hold sacred is the technical truth. It is his one true avatar. To align himself with that, but not SPEAK FOR IT. To let his actions , the code, the technical implementation speak for him. IF a poor technical decision was pushed by higher ups, then accept it and implement. After all that is why there are 3 layers of management between him and the leadership who came up or approved the idea without him. The engineer stands for his work and his agreed role. The fruits of the companys efforts and failings become apparent through that. Why would a lowly paid engineer put his neck on the line to disagree with management and potentially embarrass someone? or worse?

It's as if the blog post and people who agree with it held positions, that relied on scheming, and "alighnment" to survive.

I think many good points are made, however Ive always felt that for the same reasons I stayed out of "office politics" I would also struggle to hire my own team which could handle working together for the greater good of the company. The only solution I thought of was some sort of "fair" share dispensation.

tl:dr; OPs opinion "could sound" in parts, like upper management blaming the code monkey for not being aggressive enough in the board meeting, where about 4 tiers of middle management stood in there with him, secretly 2 are having an affair in the toilets, 1 is someones nephew who doesnt work, another is terrified of being replaced by his underlings, none know anything about the project specs, ready to PIP him for speaking up and making them look slightly incompetent, or perhaps wondering outloud why a poor decision was being floated which was clearly some machination involving the powers that be to co-exist with other nebulous contracts and corporate entities. A terrible decision that would cost the company millions in the long term, but which would enable the current c-suite to look good before departing to other roles ala yahoo. If Ive offended some upper manager, Im sorry.

> Good politics is just being strategic about relationships and influence in the service of good outcomes.

Yeah, no shit dude. That's exactly the part that's disgusting. Using the word "just" here feels dishonest.

I was subjected early on to someone who viewed every single interaction in every single relationship as transactional and framed every decision around the question "what's in it for me?"

It really warped my worldview for a long time and it took a ton of therapy and self-reflection to overcome. I'm not going to sacrifice my principles just to get something I want.

This, this, this, but with a few caveats I’ve learned for myself (both government politics and corporate politics):

* Politics in a derogatory sense is simply bad governance. It’s bad ideas leading to bad decisions, often supported by bad data or bad justifications. In government, that “bad” might be a shade of “-ism” (corporatism, fascism, authoritarianism, racism, sexism, etc), while in corporate realms it’s often either straight dicta from the executive team or manipulative malfeasance from bad actors further down the chain

* Good politics and good governance are indistinguishable from one another, by and large.

* If consensus is reached by those acting in the best interests of the organization in the long haul, everyone involved should feel fairly invigorated afterwards. That rush is what gets folks into politics more broadly, and is how movements grow

* Cooperation, historically, breeds more success than mere competition. Bad actors wielding politics as a cudgel generally try to deter others from participating because they desire competition as a means of preventing others from achieving success.

* Politics isn’t necessarily deceitful, as the OP gets into. It’s about building relationships and understanding goals, then acting collaboratively to achieve them.

* “Politics-free zones” only serve to enable the bad actors in a space, who use that label to advance their (often indefensible) ideals and clamp down on dissent.

A lot of us in tech need to do better with politics if we want technology to change the world for the better, instead of merely serve the whims of billionaire griftos or regimes hostile to human rights.

TL;DR:

You might think the people doing politics are manipulative ladder climbers, but they're climbing the same ladders available to you, so you should be one too.

While I agree that avoiding/ignoring politics isn't helpful to anyone, it still doesn't have a place at work. My view is, people are going to disagree on politics, and therefore it just gets into a debate, or worse, an agrument at the office or in chat and makes the whole situation more ugly than the manager and/or employer wants to have to deal with.

The real advice should be formulated like this - avoid office politic at all costs if you tend to take side of the humans/workers and strive for justice in any form or are advocating for recognition for worker's deeds and so on. Don't avoid office politics if you can and want to act like a mini-corporations, can be absolutely ruthless and can throw anyone under the bus if it results in the net positive value for your career.

If you tend to skew towards the first group, supporting underdogs and people abused by the company, then supporting them is morally right but net negative to your personal career. Only people who skew to the second category should really engage in office politics.