Politics arises whenever people come together. It's comfortable to think that we can simply encapsulate "politics" as such, as something for the stupid people and we the enlightened rational technical people don't concern ourselves with "politics" but unfortunately one cannot simply wish it out of existence. Politics is just a label attached to human behavior. Put 3 people together and you will have "drama" (politics on the small scale). Better learn how to understand people's motivations and incentives instead of bitterly dismissing confusing human behavior as "politics".
Agreed. Moreover, the parent poster is overlooking that in a well functioning engineering organization, political influence is at least partly a function of competence.
Right, HN tends to be very bitter and depressive about dysfunction. Of course it's selection bias too, we talk more about our complaints than our joys. But it's a very gloomy view to think that anyone who rises in an organization does so through psychopathic manipulation and passing on the hot potato then through pure bullshitting, woos the higher ups and catapults up the ladder via promotion.
And that any value is always created by some last-in-line loser who got the hot potato passed on, and his work is never noticed or credited.
If this were true, you wouldn't see anything get done. Yet, widgets roll off conveyor belts and products are shipped.
The system is never perfect, and there is always some misjudgment of who contributes usefully and who is a pure talker.
To solve large-scale problems, we have to join forces with other humans. But we can't see into each other's head, so there will be mistakes and opportunities to exploit mistakes. At the end of the day, boundaries must be drawn. There will be conflict of interests. There is conflict between the aggregate interest of the group and interests of the participants. There are ways to coordinate these, but the effect can't be fully eliminated. Inside any harmony on a large scale, you find conflict on a smaller scale. Even a mother and her fetus are in some senses competing for resources and the mother must biologically protect herself from exploitative behavior of the fetus (this objectively happens in biology).
These things are more like laws of "nature" than something to be "angry" about.
It's like game theory. The behavior of individual people may be up for judgment but the collective is predictable. You can't ascribe it to individual moral failure when you consistently observe it across organizations.
There is a certain amount of alertness that is necessary. You can exercise it at multiple points, including when deciding which company to join. It would be better if we could let down or guards and relax the alertness but ultimately it's needed.
Competence at politics is orthogonal to usefulness to the company. Often times incentives can push politics in self-destructive ways to the organization.
