Comment by msolujic
3 years ago
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.
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)
Personally, I’d aim for a new role at a medium or large sized company. Small startups are great if you want to wear a lot of hats and be close to the customer. Once a company starts getting around 50 people is when most of your job is abstracted through different fiefdoms of stakeholders, usually your project managers.
And at mega corps with 400+ people, most projects are being bolted onto a multi million dollar money printer. There’s so much more process to getting big changes out. But if you’re on the right team, you can build something novel and immediately have a market to test it out.
> 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.