You can call almost anything 'playing policits'. In other companies, getting along with your manager on purpose to get a promotion and taking credit for successes, can certainly be called 'playing politics. The difference in Google is that there's a standardized process, so maybe that avoids a manager promoting his friends.
Brilliant jerks lower the morale and output of everyone around them.
I agree that promotion processes suck if they don't create room for understated high achievers, people who are just a little more shy or awkward or humble.
But focusing exclusively on individual output and ignoring more pathologic behaviors can lead to massive problems. And some team projects absolutely require communication as a core skill that influences overall output.
But none of that is the same kind of “playing politics” that it sounds like is required by Google’s processes. Indeed, if you’re good at playing politics, you can be an absolute jerk on a regular basis, but still get promoted all the time by saying the right things to the promotion board.
Someone else’s comment had it almost right: playing politics is anything you choose to do at work primarily for the purpose of making yourself look good to those you think have the power to promote or fire you.
Something apparently missing from this is that what you say is only a small part of what the promo committee looks at. They also see peer reviews from coworkers and your manager.
So this idea of blindly sucking up to the promo committee doesn't happen. (And in practice I'd agree, everyone I've seen get promo deserved it).
The promotion board pays attention to what your co-workers say. More attention to that, then what you say, actually. If everyone says you're an asshole in your promotion packet, you're going to have a hard time getting promoted.
Who decides what "good code is"? There is no gold standard for such defenition. Guess how that gets decided? Politics.
> your design decisions
In order to "get credit", how does anybody know your design decisions were the best? Hell, how do you even know it was the right move. Just like the code, there is no 100% correct design decisions. It's all trade offs. Knowing you chose the best path and more important trying to get credit for it is.... politics.
I mean, you had to convince people your design decisions were correct to get them implemented. That was political....
> and the quality of your project output
What does "quality" mean? Wanna define it? That is politics.
What does "project output" mean? Wanna define it? That, too, is politics.
Engineers always think they can avoid "politics". But politics is everywhere and is an unescapable feature of life. It isn't even a bad thing. Any time you have limited resources and people are in contention for those resources, you are gonna get politics.
Stop trying to avoid it and embrace it. Politics are part of every job if you want to be successful.
Hell, even attempting to convince people that they should ignore politics is itself a political move.
>> your code
Who decides what "good code is"? There is no gold standard for such defenition. Guess how that gets decided? Politics.
There doesn't have to be a "gold standard", just sensible experienced programmers doing code reviews, instead of office-politics-players and executive drones.
>In order to "get credit", how does anybody know your design decisions were the best? Hell, how do you even know it was the right move.
How about people with actual domain knowledge judge that?
All the rest of the comment is the same, as if any judgement of a project/code/design is impossible outside of "who likes whom" and "who kisses whose ass".
If that's the case where one works, they should get out pronto.
