Comment by mbfg
3 years ago
The most important skills i wish someone had taught me when i was a young developer was how to interact with people in all areas of the organization, and how to deal with the politics. I was (as a young person), strongly against really wanting to know about these aspects, and instead wanted to be purely technical, but in the end that will mean more for your career than anything else, unfortunately.
This. I also wished we learned more about this in my CS degree college classes. Luckily, there is pretty good podcast series that helped me structure team leadership, management and other non technical skills. It is called: Manager tools. Here is the list of all topics on politics [1] with intro to 101 series saying this: "Your organization is MUCH more political than most of us realize. For those who know it's political, some say, I'm not going to play that game. Either state of being - not seeing the politics, or ignoring them, is unfortunate. Professional Life is HUMAN life, and that means it's emotional, and therefore political. Engineers, software designers, technical people take note: hate those marketing and sales people all you want, but they're gonna end up being your boss unless you recognize the value of political, or put differently, non-rational, decision making."
I highly recommend this series at least.
[1] https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/politics#
Seconding the Manager Tools podcast. I used to teach devs coming out of boot camps and half our time was spent on how to manage your manager.
IMO, schools of all kinds need to teach their students how power dynamics are in the real world, how most jobs are about navigating through difficult personalities, and how “being a professional” is not really about winning or losing, but how you play the game.
And look, I get that a good chunk of us would prefer to compartmentalize non-engineering work as much as possible. It’s just that knowing the rules is the best way to decide if you want to engage with them.
Do you have any resources that you recommend for a dev who's only been in tiny startups (10 people or less)
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> I highly recommend this series at least. > > [1] https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/politics#
From reading the topic overview, that looks great, genuinely good. However, there are about 30 x 25m podcasts, or about 12.5 hours of listening to do. In written form I expect that to be about 2 hours of reading (probably less).
Do you have any recommendations in written form?
Many podcasts have transcripts, show notes.
I just checked. This publisher charges for those. An interesting monetization strategy.
Thanks for the link!
Most folk think that Computing is all technical but it is still a people business. It also helps me to think of it as people engineering.
I agree with this a great deal. I think I had a strange perception of development coming out of school.
The job of a developer is to build something useful (valuable) for the company, imo.
The barrier to building something useful is rarely the pure techical difficulty, in my experience. It's knowing what to build and coordinating with others.
When I left school I was motivated a lot by building something "cool" or interesting. It's part of what got me interested in the field. But it's not the job.
Good luck knowing what to build and being able to coordinate with others if you have nobody to actually do the work. Both sets of people are needed. A lot of people in this thread seem to be promoting the non technical side but the technical side is just as important. Look at companies with strong engineering cultures like stripe and Google. You can stay on the technical side.
well put
> but in the end that will mean more for your career than anything else, unfortunately.
I strongly disagree. In my organisation engineers have higher salaries than "people persons" like managers, product owners etc. Maybe it is something Eastern Europe (Romania) does better. In my country, people become managers when they don't know what to do in life, when they have not mastered any skill in 12 years of mandatory education + higher education. People who can't code at the end of the CS curriculum have three choices basically: HR, PMO or do a Master in a totally unrelated field to increase your employability. Do you really see yourself the "acting" leader, answering to phone calls all day like a secretary and asking people about the status of their tickets? I hope not. A "people person" is easily replaceable, a good engineer is not. When the financial crisis comes and the line is drawn, engineering skills remain. That is not to say that soft skills do not matter, quite the opposite, just don't make it a day job, you will become vulnerable.
You know the very common complaint from technical people that goes "my manager/leader doesn't understand what I do"?
This is the same thing but from the other side.
Since they live in Romania, it’s very possible that they’re doing outsourced work (for HQ in another country, or even for another company altogether). In such case, the real management happens in HQ, while local managers are just handlers/babysitters like they described.
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You've just taken a good, detailed comment and dismissed it. Do you have anything else to add?
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Your livelihood depends on those with people skills. If products don't get marketed, you don't eat. If products don't get sold, you don't eat. If your leader doesn't make the hard and right decisions on where to take the company, you don't eat.
And if the product is bad neither do they. At the end of the day it's all a group effort. Good engineers are not easily replaceable in my experience.
There's a clear delimitation between the leader which takes decisions that impact the organisation and a project manager that barely has any skin in the game. In my experience, the one that takes decisions is not the one that manages people.
Being familiar with this situation, I can tell you that this type of manager is only viable/typical in the outsourcing business.
> Do you really see yourself the "acting" leader, answering to phone calls all day like a secretary and asking people about the status of their tickets?
You owe it to yourself to find higher quality "people-person"s to learn from. If that's all they're good for in your world, it's no wonder you have such a low opinion of them.
i'm not suggesting you should switch to a new role that is more of a people person role. I'm saying as an _engineer_, learning how to "politic" is way more important than learning a new language, or having a deep understanding of security, or some other significant technical thing. Not that those aren't good to know, but at some point the "politicing" will be your limiting factor if you can't play the game.
It doesn't hurt but I got a great career out of just being a hands-on kind of technical developer. I tried, and mostly succeeded to avoid places where politics play a big role. That said working well with others is important and I also do that well (If I may say so myself ;) ). Politics as in scheming for power are a total turn off for me. Never been interested and not interested in working with others that operate that way. Incredibly lucky to be able to pick and choose.
"Politics as in scheming for power are a total turn off for me."
Most people don't actually scheme for power in an organization. Not directly, anyway. Most people who appear to do that are coming from the perspective of "my (and my team's) needs are the most important here for the business' success"; the purpose isn't actually power, but to get their perceived needs met.
Playing politics, then, is being able to understand those needs, how they interplay and interfere with your own, and how to participate in a way that gets people agreeing on how to move forward, while feeling their needs are met. It is, in fact, exactly what you say of "working well with others". The difference is can you work well with people whose perceptions and needs are completely different than yours (but who are still pushing for what they feel to be the best thing for the company)?
Those few who are just trying to get ahead, without actually advancing the needs of their team are indeed a cancer, and -no one- wants them. Some orgs may not know how to recognize it or to get rid of such people though (or have perverse incentives to encourage such behavior). But their incentive isn't that different; they're still looking to meet their own needs, but it's -their own- needs, rather than that of benefit to the business. I.e., "I want to be perceived as the source of success so that I get promoted, even if that robs my team of recognition" rather than "I want to make sure my team's success is recognized and compensated, so that our morale and performance can stay high, and so the org will trust us with greater responsibility".
I think it's a good default to think "this person is acting in good faith and believes their success is aligned with the company's success", but also recognize pretty quickly when people aren't arguing in good faith and not cling to the good-faith notion for so long that it prevents you from navigating the conflict situation effectively.
> Most people don't actually scheme for power in an organization.
There is some about IT in large enterprises/banks that for all intents and purposes, groom you to do exactly this
> Those few who are just trying to get ahead, without actually advancing the needs of their team are indeed a cancer, and -no one- wants them.
It is a spectrum, not black and white. The person you responded to just have lower tolerance for self serving bullshit.
I wonder if there's a Maslov pyramid hidden in there. That is, people are first optimizing for their own comfort, then for the comfort of their team, and only then, for company goals.
People will fight their own company, throw other people under the bus, to ensure they're not being overworked and scapegoated, that they have enough budget to operate, some autonomy and say in the things they're working on. Conversely, when they don't feel threatened and aren't in the "survival mode", they'll start helping other teams and talk more about organizational goals, become proactive - whether because they care about the higher goals, or want to earn more status, autonomy or power.
There are, of course, sociopaths everywhere, but my gut tells me that for most people, it may be as simple as the model described above.
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Those who don't do politics get done by politics.
What you found are orgs with win-win (nonzero) cultures, where everyone's incentives were better aligned.
Identifying those safe harbors is a great skill.
Politics is inherent to any system comprised of human beings. There is no avoiding it and it always plays a big role.
We can abstract your statement slightly by saying that it is "scheming to meet a desired objective". Then, in a way you also played "politics" by crafting path in your career to the way you like; in a different way; likely without impacting life of others.
Overall, not all politics are bad.
The simplest situation when politics is going to bite you is when your solution competes with a technically inferior plan backed by vindictive and greedy people who see your arguments as an attempt to undermine their careers.
Not sure i agree with this one.
Plenty of places where purely technical people are appreciated, you just have to be willing to move around companies until you find a good fit.
That is not to say that you won't interact with other people within the org but politics will be less relevant.
In my 25 years of experience, I've observed that anywhere that a strong purely technical person thrives like that, there's an equally strong manager or leader behind the scenes supporting them, protecting them and clearing a path for them, even if they don't necessarily see it themselves.
That "good fit" you describe is (typically) the existence of that other person.
I don't say this to diminish the talent or accomplishments of that technical person in any way, but in most companies no one succeeds in a vacuum. It's almost always a team effort.
I think HN is a place that is quite focused on fast-growing tech companies and those are often (counter-intuitively perhaps) terrible places when it comes to workplace politics. This is because:
1. The fast growth creates demands for management and "senior dev" positions and since hiring is difficult these positions are often filled from within. This means that those positions will be filled with people who may not be ready for them yet, and who cannot properly control the politics that develop to compensate for that ("Oh person X is difficult? Just ask person Y instead, it'll be fine")
2. The fast advancements (with often come with large monetary rewards) also creates internal competition amongst employees on who will get to be promoted to the newly created position. This can seriously hamstring the company as teams of competing managers subtly sabotage each other.
3. Hiring from the outside is no panacea either, because this means that whoever felt they were "next in line" for a promotion is now faced with a newly minted superior who won't move away themselves in at least the next 18 months or so. This means that, if they want to progress in their career, they need to find another position either in another team within the company or at another company. The first option creates increased internal competition (see point 2), the second option creates increased turnover which costs money and causes loss of institutional knowledge.
4. Finally, just "being a tech company" can give the impression that workplace politics should be absent since "the tech is all that matters". This is untrue, devs are people too and ignoring interpersonal dynamics in favor of technology can be super problematic.
As a product creator I can say the same about sales. How I wish someone had told me that when it comes to SaaS the 80-20 is 80% focus on sale (traffic, customer feedback, seo, conversions, etc) and 20 percent is actually technical.
And it's not just about money, even OSS projects need a lot of push and support when the "fun" part is done.
It sounds like you’re at least partway into the journey of learning sales. Would love to know what resources you’ve consumed that were helpful to you
There was a thread recently about it here. I think it contains some very solid advice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27653357
This sounds like tacit knowledge. You have to experience it to learn. However a buddy or mentor would have been invaluable. Especially one who works elsewhere so there is no fear of reprisal (or talking behind someone’s back) when someone says “my boss was a jerk today”.
The buddy would help you understand if it’s your perspective that needs to change, you need more skills or it really is a shithouse culture and you need to leave. They can also help you understand what career path to take.
I worked somewhere where team leaders got sent to conferences and paid more. Ok looks fun to be a team leader and not a minion. Buddy would say “hang on there….”
I find that people who go down the politics path eventually stop being technical. Some might stay technical but at a very high level and could be able to write code. This may suit some people but for those who want to be software engineers and not managers it's not great advice.
There is a way out of politics. People hate being seen through. The more of a ‘ok, I see what you are about’ vibe you have going, the more self conscious they become. They often regulate down their politics. Just give people a solid death-stare, and I promise you they adjust.
You’re right, I just found the politics inscrutable and so tried to find other ways around it.
Form relationships with people who are good at that sort of thing, who value you for things that you’re good at.
Ooooh, it's time to suck our own dicks!!!