It's like two people discussing how to handle difficult conversations in a romantic relationship, and a third guy comes in and says "this conversation is irrelevant because every time I date someone they cheat on me". I'm sorry you're dealing with that problem, but it is not really related to the topic at hand.
Pretending that identifying stakeholders' needs, communicating the solutions, and delivering them are the keys to succeeding in corporate politics is a joke. It's our parent's telling us that we need to be good for Santa Claus. Human politics is an enormously deep subject, and a newbie will get trampled every single time. If you are sitting at a poker table and don't know who the sucker is within five minutes, congratulations, you are that sucker.
I don't think that's actually true. Identifying the stakeholders' needs is absolutely something that will lead to success in corporate politics. Just don't expect their needs to be about building decent products.
The majority of marriages end in divorce. This doesn't mean that I should treat all prospective partners as someone I will eventually divorce. That is not healthy for me, the people I interact with, or my future.
You should be aware that it's a possibility and act accordingly. Pretending divorce is impossible is what's unhealthy; preparing for the possibility will make for a healthier marriage and a better future, whether you ultimately divorce or not.
This is pedantic, but if I understand correctly, this is not true anymore. Moreover, this number is inflated by a set of people getting divorced multiple times.
I work at a big company. There are parts that are nepotistic and there are parts less so. I just utilize the parts that work.
It’s like a restaurant that has bad food. Do I avoid the restaurant? No I still go and get the 1 good dish.
Why would I deprive myself because the restaurant doesn’t tick every box? On the other hand, why would I go in ever thinking it’s a good restaurant?
In this case that means being in that golf game or figuring out a way how you can use corruption to get good outcomes done.
Or, more likely if your moral compass is sound, quit and find an organisation that isn’t like this.
While I agree with you that random corporate world does behave this way, companies where founders are still around - don’t - because they’re mission driven.
Another way to look at it is that your role isn't in the decision making circle, even if you are on a project that is supposed to help make a decision. I was in this role evaluating vendors solutions, in hindsight I can see how I conflated the involvement in the evaluation process with the decision making, those aren't the same.
Think of it like buying a car. You could be on the project to evaluate car companies, features, test drive them and document findings but just because you did all of that doesn't mean you're a decision maker and shouldn't have any emotional attachment to whatever the decision ends up being. Yes if they make a decision with bad trade-offs, like a car with a lot of issues, you may be dealing with those and it may suck but that's your role.
I think part of politics around technical decisions is recognizing if your role has any attributes of being involved with the decision making or if your input is just one of many, potentially minor, inputs.
Nothing wrong with being good at golf above if you want to. However this is about politics and that just means good enough to play and talk about the game.
edit: over par not under...
Playing golf alone will not get you in the circle.
Even if you never played golf getting invited to play golf by someone from the circle gets you play the golf.
If you are not the type or not the material you won’t be invited.
I am senior devsecops and save company from crashing once a year - people like me. But business guys get to play golf I am just a worker bee for them.
You're arguing against a point they weren't making, I think
note that you need lots of other social skills to use this opportunity. They are playing a game and you are a side character - if you say too much you are out of line. However you can talk for 2 minutes (out of more than an hour long round) - use your minute well.
1-2 over par is shooting 90-100 which is much more achievable :)
Who is going to do your job while you stroke egos?
Victim blaming as usual. The problem is you don't do the CTO's job in addition to your own....f-off with that hustle life nonsense.
the important point is to be known a few levels up. That will get you places.
i'm not good at this, but people who are have gone farther than me.
Non-technical skills matter. People and organizations have multi-faceted incentives. If you think the incentives of the people making decisions are leading to bad outcomes, then learn how to make that heard to them. Learn the situation as they see it, and use your own, better-aligned(?) incentives to improve the organization. And if it's not worth trying, so be it. But you need to accept that much of the world is you live in will continue to be shaped by the people who care enough to see "that hustle life nonsense" as a worthwhile trade.
A solid understanding of behavioral psychology may make it obvious, but like you mention, one could also just open a newspaper.
Every Oracle adoption for the past 40 years
When it comes to stupid decisions in the c-suite that affect me at work, I use Colin Powell’s advice to ‘disagree, but commit’. The COO isn’t going to appreciate me calling him an idiot because of some policy he put into place. I comply and move on with my life. If the bullshit stacks up too high, move on.
I worked at a place where without any of the tech staff knowing about it, the CEO literally signed a $600k/yr Adobe Experience Manager contract on a golf course with the Adobe Salesweasel, and it didn't get used at all. As far as anyone knows that bill got paid for two more years before that same CEO flew the whole company into the ground leaving ~100 people not only out of work, but unpaid for their last month and without their last 3 months worth of entitlements paid.
You're just naming legitimate stakeholders (the C-suite) and asserting that they're illegitimate.
I grant you that playing golf is a cartoonishly pathological [1] version of it, but yes, there are always people more powerful than you in the organization, and if they have an opinion on what you should be doing, then you can either try to convince them (i.e. politics), or you can give up. Not playing is not an option, and being obstinate is a good way to get fired.
So maybe a case of HN comments being "more on point than the article", but primarily in the way that it directly illustrates what the author is saying: engineers routinely bail out of the politics, to their own detriment.
(FWIW, all of the items in the parent comment's list are even less extreme, and more reasonable, than your own. For example, if you throw up your hands in disgust simply because your colleagues want to use a new tool, you're gonna have a bad career.)
[1] and likely apocryphal - there’s probably something going on that is more rational, and characterizing it as “picking the golf buddy” is a cope.
IDK about everyone else, but I pretty routinely bail out of the politics of decisions when it's mostly to the company's detriment. Starts to look like an uphill battle against people above me on the food chain? Sure man, go ahead, not my money you're wasting. The only politicking worth doing in those cases is making sure I'm outside the blast radius if it's something so bad it's gonna eventually blow up. Luckily big businesses move so slowly that this rarely takes less than a year, and often quite a bit more.
However...
> I pretty routinely bail out of the politics of decisions when it's mostly to the company's detriment.
Maybe your judgment of "detriment" is right, maybe it's wrong, but the point of the article is that too many engineers want to do what you're doing as some kind of misguided purity play.
On the contrary, you can absolutely opt out of this stuff if your skills are valuable enough. Maybe you could get a bit more money or status by participating actively in corporate politics, but often the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
I've lost count of how many times something was proposed and rejected by everyone in the chain except the C-suite. Then the C-suite overrode the process decisions basically because they played golf with someone outside the company.
I was once even part of a vendor assessment that was rejected and it turned out that the CEO had already given the green light and signed paperwork weeks before so we all were just wasting our time on something that had been decided unilaterally.