What does "playing politics" mean for software engineers?

Yes. Hence why I personally believe learning how to be productive outside of power hierarchies is the most important thing for the Western world to learn.

Yes.

It sure would have helped with my learning curve. Coming from a home and a college where it was ok to criticize or examine ideas openly, it took me a while to figure out what was I doing wrong.

There is a big cultural aspects too. This was in India. Questioning seniors in group meetings is usually a big no no that I wasn't aware of.

Well, I was aware, but I thought that an international big corp would not have that problem. Was I wrong.

This was not my experience. I had to climb a few levels to really start interacting with other teams on a consistent basis and see how politics plays out and how it could affect my own career. In particular, learning that while at a high level teams may be aligned but on a lower level there are a lot of natural reasons why individual team goals may end up in conflict with each other and how to have empathy for the goals of folks outside myself was something that took a long time to come into focus. A large number of folks seem to live in eternal ignorance of politics for most of their careers. Sometimes you just need to be exposed to the right situations to grow.

I am bent the other way.

I am very vigilant of whether I am sucking up to anyone.

So in one of my first grad school conferences I see this stalwart professor making his way through different poster presentations. I don't think he encourages it, but people fawn upon him in subtle and not so subtle ways to gain recognition. After all he is Michael Jordan.

As I saw him approach, I told myself that I will not send any signals that could plausible be mistaken for obsequiousness.

Turns out he was not the professor I thought he was and with a hindsight of few decades, I was just rude to him ... just because of mistaken identity.

Not overly rude, but not nice either. Wayward ways of the youth.

When I first started working as a programmer in the early 90's, I was surrounded by older guys whose advice was always along the lines of "hoard information and knowledge, make yourself indispensable/unfireable". It seemed like silly advice to me at the time - surely as long as I was doing good work, I'd be recognized/rewarded, right?

Yeah, after a couple of decades in this meat grinder I realized they were right: the best survival skill is to just know a lot of stuff that nobody else knows.

> unwritten rules of social play are learned in the process of growing-up.

Could you elaborate. Under which circumstances does one learn these things. Family, surely not. I hope so.

I recently had a conversation with some friends, and one mentioned that she hates office politics and tries to stay out of it. It clicked for me: people who hate/abstain from office “politics” are just clueless about the social/organizational hierarchy.

Absolutely there is some real political nastiness that can happen, but 98 3/4% of what’s described as office politics really just seems like a) make decisions that are aligned with the company and b) make someone up your management chain look good.

It's more than that, some of us actually believe in a thing called "good work."

The idea that powerful manager saying untrue things shouldn't be contradicted may seem like "obviously correct" to you, but actually at the places where 80% of engineers call that shit out that political manager probably gets booted from the company.

But many people genuinely believe politicians are a net negative on the company as a whole, and in startups many people are willing to do/say what's best for the company without expecting some individual return.

The problem is those rules aren't the same across the world, so what works in one place doesn't apply to the next.