"Think about the last time a terrible technical decision got pushed through at your company. Maybe it was adopting some overcomplicated architecture, or choosing a vendor that everyone knew was wrong, or killing a project that was actually working. I bet if you dig into what happened, you’ll find it wasn’t because the decision-makers were stupid. It’s because the people with the right information weren’t in the room."
Well, it's a decent article, but that paragraph does not match my experience. In my experience, it's typically because there's a non-technical reason why the technical decision was done badly:
1) devs, or their supervisors, or both want Hot New Thing on their resumes
2) in order to get Good New Thing purchased, the Old Bad Thing must be shown to be unworkable, so saving Old Bad Thing with a clever solution is undesirable
3) org needs a system using New Buzzword, to show to VC's or others, and this is the opportunity to use New Buzzword, whether it makes sense here or not
None of these are reasons that I like, but they are also reasons that are very convincing to most people, especially high-ranking decision makers.
I don't mean to suggest that the articles points like "Building relationships before you need them", etc. aren't a good idea. Just don't expect it to have a very high success rate in winning debates about "terrible technical decisions".
As usual HN comments are more on point than the article.
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.
I feel that a lot of the times conversations around this topic end up with some anecdote like "well, playing politics doesn't actually work because I work at a dysfunctional company where decisions are made by morons". If you have a C-suite that makes decisions based on golf games, this advice is not for you. You have a different set of problems. You should absolutely address those problems. But that doesn't mean that this advice isn't for anyone, and coming and telling everyone that the advice is always meaningless isn't accurate.
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.
Except this is an article on how to perform technical politics in large organizations. Functional, intelligent, non-nepotistic leadership is the exception, not the rule. It has been this way for a long time, perhaps forever. Dilbert became one of the most circulated comics for good reason. This article is the third guy.
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.
> Pretending that identifying stakeholders' needs, communicating the solutions, and delivering them are the keys to succeeding in corporate politics is a joke.
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.
> Functional, intelligent, non-nepotistic leadership is the exception
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.
Do factor in that people in a healthy marriage don't have a lot of marriages.
For first-time marriages, the number is still quite high (~40%)
Survivorship bias. Get burned a bunch of times and see where your strategy lies. You'd be a fool to keep sinking all your effort into things that devastate your life time and again.
If I kept getting burned, I might think about the types of people I get into relationships with, the type of things I'm learning while dating, and I might talk with friends to see how their relationships are going and see if I could be doing something different. I don't think I would start telling everyone in a relationship to prepare for divorce.
People change; especially over decades.
I've been divorced once. That in itself doesn't mean I go around telling people to not get married.
But, it does mean that I forced [1] my 2nd wife to sign a pre-nuptual agreement, and I go around recommending others to do so as well.
[1] she initially refused to sign it, I told her the wedding's off if she doesn't, so she did; she's still unhappy about this and hates me for a day whenever she's reminded of it; this was 5 years ago, we're still married and not divorcing currently; while I know it doesn't sound romantic, it was the right thing to do because people and life circumstances change _a lot_; I hope we will stay together forever and get buried next to each other, but I had the same hope with my 1st wife and then she cheated on me when my then-startup was failing, so now, much wiser, I can see a 1000 ways for such hopes to fall apart
Brother, I'm in the same boat as you.
This unhappiness that your wife has will not go away and you will deal with situation at some point. These hard conversations have a way of finding you.
I won't tell you to tear up the pre-nup, but I highly recommend coming up with a compromise (over time) that meets both of your needs.
I know what you mean, I do think about how to soften this situation often. It'd be easier if she'd be rational about it, but she's not the rational type — which is even more reason to have the pre-nup..
> It'd be easier if she'd be rational about it,
My man, all of us would. I talk to my wife often about this. We are just built differently and that is what makes the opposite sex so attractive tbh. That irrationality comes out in different positive ways I'm sure (or you wouldn't have married), you can't just turn it on and off (unfortunately)
> I told her the wedding's off if she doesn't
Did you tell here beforehand (earlier in relationship) you wanted a prenup, or only after proposal?
Judges toss prenups all the time. You best keep her happy.
This is not in the US.
So? That means they're all worthless?
In the US at least, I suspect they're worse than useless because they start the marriage off by giving the woman something to feel bitter about.
> 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.
Respectfully, what you should do is first make sure you don't live somewhere that recognizes common law marriage, then commit to that person without actually legally marrying her.
> The majority of marriages end in divorce
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 think these discussions always miss a nuance.
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?
If your c-suite is idiotic or nepotistic you can absolutely still influence them with good politics, you just need to understand their incentives and frame your arguments that way. You need to understand that you’re not playing meritocracy and get your outcomes done in the system you are playing.
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.
> If you have a C-suite that makes decisions based on golf games, this advice is not for you. You have a different set of problems.
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.
> shouldn't have any emotional attachment to whatever the decision ends up being
This is really good advice for anyone working in a large corporation.
If the C-suite makes decisions "based on golf games" then you need to learn how to play golf. You don't have to be good, but don't be so bad that you slow up the game. It is okay to be 1-2 over par every hole, but you need to nearly always find your ball and not hit too far into the rough. Take some lessons if needed. (there are swings that don't have as much power but are a lot easier to be accurate - perfect for you who doesn't want you win, you just want to be good enough to play the game). Then make sure you are on the list of people who will "complete your four-some" when anyone is looking for someone to play.
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...
That’s advice like „wake up earlier, read more books to be just like Bill Gates”.
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.
I think they're saying that learning to play golf is necessary to succeed in such an environment. I don't think they're claiming that learning to play golf is sufficient to succeed.
You're arguing against a point they weren't making, I think
playing golf is what gets you in a place where you can be invited. Eventually 3 people will have a round planned - but a round is 4 people so they will take anyone who is able to play right then. If you can't play golf you are not invited - or if you say you do but can't you get black listed.
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.
Sorry to nitpick, and I know what you mean, but 1-2 under par on each hole you would be shooting ~45-55 which would basically be the best in the world :)
1-2 over par is shooting 90-100 which is much more achievable :)
Thanks, fixed that.
Respecting and engaging with company politics in order to push good engineering decisions is one thing, but learning and playing a sport, I think falls outside of "other duties as assigned" for an engineer.
Also how do you get invited? When the invitee is specifically inviting the CEO without you to circumvent your influence?
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.
You don't play with the ceo normally, but you play with others who play with the ceo (might be another level).
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.
if you're one or two strokes under par for every hole you'll be invited because you're a world class player, or more likely you don't want to get invited because who wants to play with people who suck that bad?
You get invited by actually trying to play. Not everyone who tries will get in, but it's a lot more likely that you'll succeed if you work the problem, instead of throwing up your hands in disgust at the world.
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.
I don't know if "victim blaming" [1] is the right wording, but I agree.
Doing weird shit like learning & going golfing just to keep idiots from making bad decisions shouldn't be part of our jobs.
[1] I don't think "victim" is a good term; we can always go get other jobs or drive a school bus instead
I'd add that in my experience, when you are close to the action, the cynic "golfing nepotism" take is usually missing a point of view that is far more rational; just far from the developer/architect that is dismissing the decision. Perhaps not technically optimal, or fair, or even legal - but even so, more akin to "I know this person delivered in the past, and the alternative is also good on paper" or "I really need to save my ass" (nobody got fired by choosing IBM) or "business-wise, this technical recommendation I don't really care for". Perhaps I'm optimistic but in general I don't really think (or want to believe) that people are quick to wage their careers on an acquaintance that is clearly selling something as part of their job, unless the stakes are really not so high from their point of view. Then again, open a newspaper :)
This is just one example that was made public due to the federal case, but there is no doubt that this kind of activity is quite common in corporate America at all levels. https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executiv...
A solid understanding of behavioral psychology may make it obvious, but like you mention, one could also just open a newspaper.
> Then the C-suite overrode the process decisions basically because they played golf with someone outside the company.
Every Oracle adoption for the past 40 years
And 100% of TikTok and Paramount information control acquisitions.
The golfist outside the company played the political game better than the people inside the company.
I would guess that most (?) decisions involving salespeople and the c-suite are relationship based. My entire industry runs more or less on personal relationships (commercial construction). In my case, virtually all of the work I sell is to people that trust me to deliver because I have repeatedly done so in the past. Every time I get a new customer I aim to build a relationship and deliver the best possible product I can so I get more work in the future, there’s always another guy with his foot jammed in the door waiting for you to fuck up and swoop in.
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.
In same industry, our head of customer relations was asked recently, why did we award the job to x company? His reply hilatiously was: "i had lunch with him last, thats really how it works", made me chuckle. You must grease the wheels...always.
> 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
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.
C-suite stands to gain or lose most as a result of these decisions (even if a lesser loss is perceived more acutely by an engineer). Short of bribery, it's their calls to make.
>Short of bribery, it's their calls to make.
Sometimes falling short, maybe by just a hair, sometimes not :\
> As usual HN comments are more on point than the article....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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Well, like I said: you can always give up. Sometimes that's the rational thing to do, even when you are engaged in the game.
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.
> Not playing is not an option, and being obstinate is a good way to get fired.
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.
It's always golf... or something much more NSFW....
I think the article is arguing that if you build the relationship, you can involve yourself into these conversations early enough to direct them the way that your idea would go. In your cases, for example:
1. Recognizing early enough that this Hot New Thing incentive is here and figuring out how your Good New Thing can live with the Hot New Thing
2. Helping show the Old Bad Thing is unworkable for your Good New Thing
3. Understanding that the org cares about New Buzzword and framing your work under those pretenses.
I think the article is great, in theory; it just NEVER works this way in practice, unless you may be in a technical organization. There are ALWAYS business reasons that cause technical projects to fail. We regularly see the articles about the failure rate of technical projects all the time on the front page.
Why is this? Because the number and weight of the business folk almost always outnumber the technical. You can be the best fucking political engineering wrangler in the world; building relationships, taking people along for the ride, helping others gain understanding and those projects still fail.
> There are ALWAYS business reasons that cause technical projects to fail
So it's always business folks' fault, and never the nerds' fault? My experience has been different (full disclosure - professional nerd for 30 years)
For the overwhelming majority of day-to-day, line-of-business software, the nerds are a commodity and the project succeeds or fails on how good or bad the business folks are. They should get the blame for the failures but also the credit for the successes.
For the stuff that is genuinely pushing the technical envelope, it's possible for the nerds to make the difference. In those cases you do see the projects fail for technical reasons like "the code couldn't scale to the required number of users" or "the technical functionality never worked reliably", and those kind of failures are the nerds' fault. But that's the minority of failures IME.
I appreciate you replying. My intent was never to place blame; instead, it was to point out that while the article's author suggests technical folks need to play the game better, I feel that it won't matter and getting the rest of a non-technical-first org along for the ride is more difficult than just being a solid political player.
The article's point is that "the rest of a non-technical-first org along for the ride" is indeed playing politics (or at least a subset thereof).
>There are ALWAYS business reasons that cause technical projects to fail.
I agree with this concept and what's worse is when a project is technically sound but still fails, or even when a complete high-performance accomplishment fails to be deployed.
But I'll bend the terminology of "always" and "business" because it applies even wider than that.
If you've ever worked for a 19th century company that is an actual bureau by definition, and has had literally over a century to develop from those roots into a much more resilient bureaucracy than could be accomplished in less time, you know what I mean.
What if it's not always a business reason for failure but a bureaucratic component that rises above a tolerable level?
i.e. a non-business reason for "businessmen" to fail.
In a pure bureaucracy that exists solely to maintain standards of some kind, the focus can not be on making money, or the standards could be compromised.
Others will fall by the wayside and only the most successful bureaucrats will prevail in their efforts. Handsomely rewarded sometimes through fees and taxes paid by the real money-makers whom the bureau has evolved to serve.
Yes, rewarded for their efforts, none of which are business-like at all and without any internal focus on making money whatsoever.
These organizations can be some of the most stable and long-evolved of all, plus set the most consistent example of political hierarchy that people in all kinds of places can tend to emulate when they don't have any better ideas.
So when bureaucracy creeps into a business where it has not yet made an incursion, it has to do so under the radar because it's the opposite of trying to make money.
People get good at this and move up in the hierarchy, and eventually there's nobody who's even good enough at actually trying to make money any more. It's a full-time effort just building & maintaining the bureaucracy.
You end up with people that "look" like businessmen, act the way they think businessmen should act, golf like businessmen, etc.
But haven't got a clue how to make a dollar from a functional technical success that's a complete no-brainer :\
This.
I've recently been promoted to be a VP (so, an executive) at a large corporation of ~50,000 people. Of the top ~250 people, so the top 0.5% of the hierarchy [who get invited to the annual leadership offsite], I estimate there are maybe 2-3 technical people like me. Also, within the executive hieararchy, these 2-3 are at the lowest level, this is not even where the big decisions get made, we're just put in charge of executing the decisions made by MBAs and Finance people.
Never works in practice is such a strong statement and I would argue that most of the time is because the technical people avoid politics entirely, like the article says
I dunno, honestly, my organization works a lot like what the post is describing. I think my org has healthy politics but at the same time I can't really tell if the times I thought the politics were "toxic" were simply because I was on the outside looking in, whereas this time I'm an operator in the space.
Engineers are always insufferable with this stuff. I can think of dozen times where everything was perfect, except for <thing we didn’t think of> or <thing we knew but didn’t bother to engage the customer on>.
There’s a million reasons why projects fail, but astute engineering mangers who are able to understand what the business really needs are invaluable.
What about RTO? New 'ai-first' genai initiatives?
I mean sometimes you are outruled. That's part of recognizing politics, in my opinion. If your VCs want you to do GenAI and you think it's dumb, you are overruled. But you can still benefit from this in a lot of ways. You just need to recognize what you can benefit from.
Sure,though this stands in contrast to the author's thesis: "It’s the loud person who’s wrong getting their way because the quiet person who’s right won’t speak up."
Politics involves understanding the hierarchy though. And understanding when you are overruled.
If the hierarchy is saying "it's time for GenAI", you have the option to participate in a way that raises your profile and positively influences the company (involving politics), if you hate GenAI so much you can leave, or you can stay silently and opt out of the process. These are all choices. Personally I'm fine with my VCs making strategic decisions since they trust me to make technical decisions. So we can do GenAI, we'll just do it in a way that works and is sustainable for the codebase.
You should realize that as a technical person your domain is not business strategy. Similarly I'd be shocked if any VC ever came in and told me "to use PostgreSQL" or some other nonsense. If you want to be the person deciding what we build, go into Product.
I will repeat again, this is in direct opposition to the author's thesis: "It’s the loud person who’s wrong getting their way because the quiet person who’s right won’t speak up."
Given that, I'm not sure what your message is in response to. I will say that 'learn to parcipate in the hierarchy' and 'everything is a choice, just quit!' are hardly solutions at all, and read more as truisms.
I'll add that I'm not sure what VCs have to do with anything here, though as someone who formally took VC funding, I wouldn't want them making technical or strategic decisions on my behalf, and I suspect the majority of founders (and others on my cap table) would agree.
I think if you're in the position of being a founder, this article isn't for you. And our conversation isn't really talking about the same thing, which explains the lack of common ground here.
Agreed. In my experience, a lot of this has been the XY problem. C level has a legitimate need or problem, they think they've solved it by asking for technology Z and the people who actually know the systems aren't consulted. When they do push back, it's seen as not following orders, so now we have to shoehorn in some dumb solution that doesn't fit in with the rest of the env. It works, so leadership doesn't understand why it's a problem.
> org needs a system using New Buzzword, to show to VC's or others, and this is the opportunity to use New Buzzword, whether it makes sense here or not
Oh lord, I have seen some nonsense built because some prospective investor wanted to see us "do something with AI" lest we be "left behind" somehow.
The thing is, from the point of view of getting investment money, it is probably the "right call". It's just not the business of making technology decisions, it's the business of making technology cosplay. Not my business.
Oh I agree, in that sense these features fulfill their true purpose, which is to assure some clueless VC that his money will be at the forefront of innovation or some hogwash. But they give zero value to the end users, who largely ignore them. Maybe even negative value, considering the opportunity cost.
As others have said before me, "the hype IS the product".
I am sure you could have came up with a legit use case for AI
You come up with solutions to use cases. Inventing a use case to justify a solution is backwards and by definition not legitimate.
No, you have the use case and then do the trade study to determine if AI is the right choice or something else given a set of criteria. That’s how you do systems engineering
I as a self interested actor as we all are see nothing wrong with:
1) Since around 2008 I’ve had 8 jobs after staying at my second job for nine years. Whether I was laid off or chose to get another job because of salary compression and inversion, being able to get a job quickly - and it’s never taken me more than a month even in 2023 and last year - was partially because at now 51, I have made damn sure I stay up to date with real world use of the “latest hotness”.
2) see #1
3) if you are a VC backed company, your shining light is not “make a good product”. It’s “the exit” and shortly afterwards a blog post about “our amazing journey” where they announce the product is going to be shut down.
The goal of politics in the office is not to do “the right thing”. It’s to stay in alignment with the people who control your paycheck and to make sure you can keep exchanging money for labor when time comes to her another job.
Regarding #1, when people ask what is the best skill I acquired during my career, I always answer that it was "learning how to do well in interviews".
For a very long time it was the only thing I focused. Quite often the job itself is pretty easy, getting in is the hard part.
In the past couple of years I let it slide a bit because keeping yourself sharp for interviews is sort of a pain in the ass, but I promised nyself that 2026 I'm back at it
It depends on what type of interviews you expect. My value proposition hasn’t been my ability to write code for over a decade. It was first being the first or second technical hire by a then new director/manager/CTO brought in to lead a new initiative as a lead/architect and then working in customer facing cloud consulting roles combined with hands on keyboard coding.
With those roles, it’s all about soft skill behavioral interviews and system design. I can do those in my sleep. I just keep a career document of all of my major projects and describe them in STAR format so I can review them when needed.
Absolutely, I was talking about very technical roles, typically as a software developer. "Individual Contributor" in contemporary corporate jargon.
I was never interested in other roles.
The problem with those roles are that they are easily commoditizable and were even before AI. It’s also harder to stand out from the crowd if (the royal) you has as your only vector of competition is an ability to do coding interviews.
I was very much and I am very much an IC. I chose a path to manage and deliver projects with about half and half hands on keyboard coding and the other half dealing with “the business” and not manage people. But if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, “codez real gud” only gets you to a mid level role.
> The problem with those roles are that they are easily commoditizable and were even before AI
There are pros and cons about being in a "commoditizable" role. I honestly am not worried at all about AI.
> It’s also harder to stand out from the crowd if (the royal) you has as your only vector of competition is an ability to do coding interviews.
Which is why I said that the best skill I ever acquired was "how to be interviewed".
> But if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, “codez real gud” only gets you to a mid level role.
I just wanted enough that I could afford a house and raising a family. Mid level role provides that, and it is what I optimized for.
First you have to get the interview. I don’t know how old you are. But the older you are (I’m 51) the harder it is to get mid level hands on keyboard roles.
It’s a shit show out here right now. It’s actually worse than the dot com bust. I had no trouble getting jobs then as an enterprise dev working in Atlanta with four years of experience.
Have you looked for a job post 2022? My experience in 2023 and 2024 when I was looking for a bog standard enterprise dev job (twice) that needed AWS experience. Mind you in 2023, I had 5 years of AWS experience leading projects with hands on keyboard work including 3 working directly for AWS leading projects at AWS ProServe.
A) submitting my resume for standard enterprise dev jobs blindly to ATS’s using LinkedIn Easy Apply, Indeed, etc: I submitted hundreds of resumes and heard crickets. LinkedIn shows you how many people applied, if your application has been viewed and how often your resume has been viewed. Maybe 3-5x my application was even looked at.
B) Targeted outreach to internal recruiters based on a niche of niche in AWS where I was an industry wide subject matter expert [1] - two interviews one offer.
C) reaching out to my network based again not on them wanted someone who could code - coders are a dine a dozen. They wanted someone who was hands on but also had a history of working through all of the complexities of dealing with organizations and “getting things done”. I had two full time offers and one short term side contract.
The three offers came within two weeks. It would have been a lot harder no matter how well I could do on a coding interview to stave out.
That was in 2023. A year later I was let go of the shitty company that I did accept the offer from through my outreach to recruiters. I got an offer from responding to an internal recruiter for the job I have now within three weeks. But I also did the randomly submitting my resume again while I was waiting with the same results.
> First you have to get the interview. I don’t know how old you are. But the older you are (I’m 51) the harder it is to get mid level hands on keyboard roles.
42 here. I still didn't hit that wall. I presume it does exist, yes. That said, I noticed over time that it is becoming more common to see older engineers than it used to be.
Migrating to managerial roles for me is a no-go however. I can't stand managing people.
> Have you looked for a job post 2022?
Yes, I switched jobs last time in 2023. I still get invitations for interviews, though not as often as it used to be, say, in between 2015-2021.
However, I live in Europe. I have the impression that things are not as dire here as they are in your side lf the pond in terms of employment in IT.
> They wanted someone who was hands on but also had a history of working through all of the complexities of dealing with organizations and “getting things done”.
I mean, that is very important in IC roles. Part of my interview prep is a very detailed account of multiple projects I participated in STAR format, highlighting it from inception to delivery, including outcomes.
All that said, I think things are going to be in a slump for a while longer, and might get worse next year. It's a bad time to be job-hopping. I do interviews here and there only to keep myself sharp.
> Migrating to managerial roles for me is a no-go however. I can't stand managing people.
We are in complete agreement here. I don’t manage people directly. But being responsible for projects that involve a other people does require you to know how to peer feedback, use soft skills etc.
> However, I live in Europe. I have the impression that things are not as dire here as they are in your side lf the pond in terms of employment in IT.
Probably not as bad and to be fair, if I were still looking for in office jobs in Atlanta where I spent my career from 1996-2020 working locally, it would have been easier. I assume in Europe you’re also not dealing with competing against the young tech bros.
> I mean, that is very important in IC roles. Part of my interview prep is a very detailed account of multiple projects I participated in STAR format, highlighting it from inception to delivery, including outcomes.
Thats definitely not mid level pulling tickets off a board behavior (that’s a compliment btw). I think we are in “violent agreement”.
Ahhh, my bad. I took your original take as a role where you would oversee other people, in opposition to an IC - who I presumed could only be "mid-level".
So yeah, I totally agree with you. Understanding the business is important in that sense. Especially when communicating the outcome of projects to non-technical stakeholders. I go out of my way on my current role to produce metrics that I can graph to show the positive outcomes of projects.
One of the things I learned is that non-technical people in particular love this sort of eye-candy. I don't say this in a derogatory way, it is a good way to communicate stuff.
Yes, recognizing reality and the incentive structure is powerful. Then one can make smart tradeoffs. Most people want to stay in apparent alignment with their employer to advance. But sometimes perfect alignment isn’t optimal for what you want to do next.
Some examples:
Some might want to work on an interesting project with a new technology, even though it isn’t a recognized fit for your company.
Some prefer to build strong and trusted relationships for referrals later.
Some people will pursue aims that are to the detriment of their company. *
It is wise to recognize the diversity of goals in people around you.
* Getting great alignment is not easy. Not with people, not with highly capable intelligent agents trained with gradient descent that will probably operate outside their training distribution. Next time you think a powerful AI agent will do everything in your interests, ask yourself if your employee will do everything you want, just as you would want it.
> The goal of politics in the office is not to do “the right thing”. It’s to stay in alignment with the people who control your paycheck and to make sure you can keep exchanging money for labor when time comes to her another job.
I fully agree with this after attempting to ‘do the right thing’ and getting nowhere. I don’t have all of the information the decision makers have, so I may not have the full picture. Even if it’s a bad decision, it’s out of my hands. Now I do what Colin Powell advised: “disagree and commit”. You can’t win every battle, so you’ll have to accept certain decisions and move on, and accomplish your goals regardless.
This guy businesses.
Big decisions are almost always made on factors that are more relationship based than technical based at the end of the day.
Many highly technical people despise management, MBAs, and anything in that orbit. This is understandable, but leads to a lot of frustration.
If you truly want to guide major decisions you are going to be more effective at the top of the stack than the bottom. Every tier has trade offs, and you are almost always having to sell some part of your soul to truly move up.
Like it or not, most technical companies these days are managed to short terms goals and payouts. The C Suite, investors, etc are all just there for a payday. The actual product or anything else is just a detail in the goal of collecting commas. If you recognize this, you have a better chance of managing your own expectations at whatever level you are in the org. If you spend your time fighting for something that is not truly the goal of the company you will tend to have a bad time overall.
C-suite only get credit for changes, so they are incentivized to make changes at random and hope some of them turn out to look good in hindsight.
As I heard once, in a large company VPs are rated by the number of reorgs they initiated per year. That explained so much insanity I have seen: a project gets moved to different directors, then after 5 reorgs ends up in its original place. Just large company things, VPs have to show "impact" where there is none.
And even if it was because the right people weren't in the room, that's still a leadership failure. Part of the job of those decision-makers is to get the right people into the room
With good leadership, politics won't feel like politics. Everything this article describes as "good politics" is definitely good stuff to do, but none of it should feel like politics to your typical "I hate politics" engineer. Building relationships? That's just meeting interesting coworkers. Understanding the real incentives? That's keeping the big picture in mind, a standard requirement for any engineer. Managing up effectively? A good manager will treat you like the expert that you are and that happens automatically. Creating win-win situations? That's that big picture thing again. Being visible? Who doesn't like to share the cool stuff they've done?
I hate politics. I do all of those "good politics" things and I enjoy all of it. It might technically be "politics" but it's not what we think of when we say the word.
This article boils down to a semantic argument. They want to carve out a section of the job and put it under the label of "politics" when most of us would not put it there. That label may be right, it may be wrong, but I don't really care. It's just not an interesting argument. I think this article would be a lot better if it dropped the P word entirely and just explained why and how you should do the "good" things it lists.
> but none of it should feel like politics to your typical "I hate politics" engineer [...] Who doesn't like to share the cool stuff they've done?
Certainly many would prefer to just enter flow state and work on their craft, work the wood with the chisel (=do the engineering work), etc. It is of course not a good strategy in reality, and it doesn't matter what people "want", but let's at least admit that plenty of people don't enjoy having to interact a lot. People-oriented vs thing-oriented.
I know that plenty of people don't like doing presentations and writeups and such, but just telling your coworkers about whatever cool thing you've done seems to be pretty much universally enjoyed in my experience.
> "terrible technical decisions".
Another point worth bringing up is that sometimes, that stuff doesn't matter. I see so many engineers get hopelessly invested in technical debates that are, honestly, just silly: it's often better for the company to get something barely-good-enough done quickly than to flesh out the "optimal" design over the course of weeks or months, and over the dead bodies of people who have a different opinion about vi-versus-emacs.
And even if you accumulate tech debt, it is sometimes a wise decision to pay it back later, when you (hopefully) have more money and time.
So, I'd add "pick your battles wisely" to the list of tips.
Exactly my point of view. For the most part I do not root for my preferred technology, but rather try to inform my powers about the caveats I see. This way at least the right aspects to check have a chance to enter the debates above my payroll.
Yeah, this is ignore the fact that human is not taking all rational decision all the time
more often that not its based on feeling
Exactly right. I see a shitty feature I say "someone got promoted for that".
the most common I've seen is "person in charge of Project That Makes No Sense is the most aggressive and willing to do deceitful things to make themselves look good"
There's also option 4: CxO was out golfing with some rich friends that happen to own <vendor of buzzword software> and/or is getting kickbacks, so now we have to use <crap buzzword software> instead of <old solution> or just not using it at all because what the software offers isn't needed, but CxO doesn't know because he's out golfing, banging hookers and snorting coke all freaking day.
And yes, this kind of shit happens regularly - sometimes, people even get busted for it like that Netflix executive who got kickbacks from, amongst others, Netskope [1].
Let's be real: no matter how good you are at networking - unless you come from Old Money or have a wildly successful exit under your belt, you are not joining the club of elite morons that actually pulls the strings.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executiv...