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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps, instead of seeing your job as "what the job description says", you should see it as "whatever actually gets me rewarded."

Which is to say, at some companies, playing office politics is your real job. "Work" is just a signal you can emit to show that you are willing to submit enough to not get fired.

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Perhaps doing more office politics than productive work is your job's signal it's time to leave. Do you want to work at a company where more resources are wasted on keeping the lights on so to speak than providing value to users? I sure don't.

If you can't talk to the CEO or CTO, if you're technical, on your first day physically at the company, that's a Bad Signal (tm).

I was assuming a context of "you become aware that your company has this problem, and yet you persist in wanting (or needing) to work there." For example, you might you need the money, live somewhere crap for jobs, and your mortgage is underwater so you can't move somewhere better. If that's the case, then you should, in all pragmatic cynicism, think about your "real job" at the company.

Actually, perhaps I need to preface all my advice with "in all due pragmatic cynicism." I've added it to four posts so far and people seem to react much better to them when I do.

Ah, pragmatic cynicism. Never was a fan of that, always more of a fan of unpragmatically changing things for the better. Especially these days when the global unemployment rate for programmers is ~3%, you will get a different job and you will get it quickly.

I'm told life looks very different if you have done anything resembling settling down. But I haven't been there yet and my glasses have rose coloured lenses.

I was in a highly political and highly toxic situation prior to my current engagement. It took me over two years to get out of it. If you are not already in one of a handful of major tech hubs, it can be extremely difficult to get out such a situation. Granted, the pragmatic cynicism doesn't help, but if you can stomach it you can stay in a somewhat better frame of mind than I let myself devolve into.

Out of curiosity, what was it that was keeping you at that job? Lack of money? Family? Moving options?

Yup. If you become good at corporate politics, you become someone who's good at corporate politics. It's the first time I really understood the whole 'if you stare into the abyss, it also stares into you' thing.

It's a bit like martial arts. Being good at it is nice since you don't have to be afraid of being beaten up. If you have to fight someone every day however, there might be something wrong.

Most individuals wouldn't have chosen that deal at face value, so it's understandable if they eventually come to resent their "real job."

Accusing politics of being the downfall of some enterprise is a highly purist position. Politics is usually meant as "things that aren't coding that I don't like". Even political virtuosos still accuse blame politics when convenient.

I have seen politics kill someone's work and I have seen a project launch by doing nothing but working away and submitting their end product to flabbergasted responses. But it's rarely so simple.

If you don't understand what's going on and blame politics, you are living in a foreign land and don't understand the language. If you understand and don't try to ensure your voice is heard and respected, you don't understand the customs. If you don't understand the language and customs, you're at the nations mercy.

But fundamentally if you view it as opposed to work you'll rarely succeed in the best outcome even if you do strike a balance.

People call poisonous behavior "politics". Positive behavior is "collaboration".

I've been in situations where politicking allowed the company to pivot from an established, ineffective strategy to an new, better one.

I don't know a lot of people who want to play office politics, so I don't really see how "politics is your real job" would actually help. It just transforms it from "politics gets in the way of my job" to "my job isn't what it should be, nor what I want".

This is spot on, in many engineering jobs getting the right technical decision made requires you to exercise influence over management and peers. And having some influence in the bank involves a careful tending over a long period. If that makes you unhappy, try to think of it as building up karma so you comments go straight to the top of the list.

Perhaps HR should put what actually gets rewarded in the job listing. That way, both employers and employees can save a lot of time by not interviewing for jobs they aren't interested in. If employers were more honest and listed job requirement such as "kissing ass" and "play office politics like you're a congressperson", then we'd all know what jobs to avoid.

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