There are so many interactions at work outside of politics, which I would define as the advancement of your personal agenda before that of the organization and of anybody else.
I have such rich interactions with my colleagues. Sometimes we work together on a project. Sometimes it's purely social, like the first few minutes of a meeting with someone I haven't talked to in a long time. Sometimes they need my support or I need theirs. And sometimes (rarely) it's about having an uncomfortable conversation because something didn't go well. But none of these is about politics. I love where I work, in big parts because of the lack of politics.
It can turn into office politics fast. Maybe you say the wrong thing and now you and your coworker have an awkward tension.
IMO it's almost never worth trying to make friends with your coworkers. Be nice, be helpful, and do a good job but keep your friends and work life separate.
In my experience most close friends vent about their jobs to each other. Something that I very rarely feel comfortable doing with coworkers. I think I've met about 2 coworkers in my whole career who I felt that level of comfort with.
Where is the line for you? Is a meeting with a sales team “office politics”? What about a meeting with software developers?
The problem is that there’s no reasonable definition of “office politics” that frames it as a positive thing. You’re approaching every interaction negatively as something you can win/lose.
> Yes because if you look at it objectively those people tend to be lying, manipulative people with big fake smiles on their faces.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. There’s nothing objective about what you’re saying here. You just paint a huge group of people with a very broad (and very negative) brush.
If that’s what helps you feel superior to other people, I guess there’s not much I can do about it. But I’d encourage you to reexamine how you see the real people around you.
You misunderstood what I was saying. What I meant was that lying and manipulating are generally considered objectively bad by most people. However, that behavior is considered normal in corporate cultures. It's even part of the job if you're in marketing or sales!
And no, I won't stop judging large groups of people who's jobs are built on deception. And I won't stop judging people who are naturally drawn to those jobs. I've had enough of this whole system and I'm done apologizing for saying negative things just because these behaviors and jobs are normal.
Sexualizing products. Creating cute jokes during the super bowl. Implying that if you buy this product, you'll improve your social status.
Am I expected to believe that these things are about communicating value? I'm sorry but that's a steaming pile of BS.
Using power tactics with your customers during sales calls. Creating a sense of urgency. Bending the truth to make your product appear more favorable in general and vs competitors products.
Am I expected to believe that these things are about communicating value? I'm sorry but that's a steaming pile of BS.
This is a false equivalency. Most software engineers aren't working on weapons, but most sales and marketing people engage in deception and other amoral practices.
Not to mention that software engineers literally build the products. Sales and marketing's job is to shove it down people's throats.
To the contrary, I think paulcole made a great point. It doesn’t need to be weapons. A programmer who makes a social media feed more addictive isn’t necessarily moral. But a salesperson/marketer can promote something generally seen as good, or at least far more good than the example programmer.
Ad campaigns can remind people to vote, encourage people to quit smoking, or convince people to avoid drunken driving. A marketer is behind for the design and distribution of these public advocacy campaigns.
No it's not a great point. It's a point made to distract from the real issue. It's a debate tactic.
If you read the conversation carefully I'm trying to discuss the fundamental nature of the professions, not the specific products they are building or selling. That was something paulcole brought up.
The fundamental nature of sales and marketing is manipulating people for personal gain. You could be selling hugs or whatever warm and fuzzy product you can imagine, but at the end of the day the sales person's job is to be the best people manipulator they can be.
And I've seen it countless times through my career. I've met many sales people, I've sat in on sales calls, and I've heard them discussing their trade. It's honestly disgusting.
On the other hand, the fundamental nature of engineering is building things. It's bringing something new into the world. It couldn't be more different from sales and marketing.
It sounds like this is a difference in personal values. You can certainly assess the morality of one’s work based on its methods, but it’s also valid to assess the morality based on outcomes.
On outcomes: You framed building things and creating new things as inherently good, but entire fields of the philosophy of science question whether technological progress is inherently good. Is AI-generated art necessarily good if it causes artists to lose jobs? Are ad trackers necessarily good if it increases engagement at the loss of privacy? Are hackers/crackers seen as more noble than salespeople, as they create new exploits that make hospitals pay ransom, and expose people’s information? If a new chemical weapon or bioweapon is created, are its developers inherently noble for creating something new? Even Einstein expressed deep regret for his role in developing the atomic bomb (and Feynman went into a depression) after its usage.
On methods: most methods start as morally neutral. A person training to be a soldier may or may not end up doing immoral things, depending on what they do in their career. Research scientists may or may not do moral things (though nowadays most abide by research ethics, in the past and likely the present, many studies have caused far more suffering than their benefits). Lawyers can go on to defend fundamental rights, or end up filing frivolous lawsuits or chasing ambulances. Developers can create something genuinely useful, or cause people to lose jobs or get killed due to bugs.
To be charitable to your point: yes, I intuitively have a deep sense of respect for the discipline required to become a good software developer and create something new. But it’s completely separate from a moral respect and moral judgement: I have to know what that developer is actually creating, and how that will impact real people.
You can use the utilitarian argument to justify anything. According to your logic hugging people isn't good or bad because technically you can hug someone to death. Engineering is a form of human expression and human expression is generally good, even if it can be used for evil.
A sick society corrupts good things and incentivizes bad things. Yeah sure, a sales person can sell hugs and use their money to donate to charity but that doesn't change the fact that their job exists because our society creates perverse incentives and I definitely judge people who are naturally drawn to these positions.
Most people would be happy if sales people were no longer needed in society. They are a necessary evil.
I think the soldier comparison is interesting. At least with soldiers there is plausible deniability because being a soldier doesn't automatically mean murder. It's not like soldiers have a daily murder quota. However, the same isn't true for sales. Sales people have sales quotas. Their entire job is shoving products down peoples throats.
They are also the reason why you have a job. Without sales you have nothing. Without marketing you don't know what to build. Building stuff that no one wants is useless.
Understanding politics that way is common and understandable. It's also an unfortunate cultural construction of the term, because this understanding is deeply incorrect.
Politics is what happens when people disagree about what should be done, or how it should be done. That's it. That's what politics is.
There are principled and corrupt reasons for disagreement. There are forthright and deceptive/manipulative means of engaging disagreement. All of that is politics.
When someone is advocating for a better PTO policy either because they personally would like something more advantageous for themselves or because they think it'll boost morale and productivity, that's politics.
When someone manages their office relationships to increase their chances or being hired into a higher management position either because they personally would like to advance their career or because they think they can help the business run more effectively, that's politics.
When someone attempts to spoil management on tech stack X and talk up tech stack Y, that's politics whether it's because they know both well and are sure which will suit the business & problem domain better, or because their personal expertise is more with Y than X and it'll increase their value to the organization without further investment.
The problem with assuming "politics" refers to inherently underhanded activity is that it shirks the work of engaging disagreement productively and instead pathologizes disagreement in one way or another -- usually by either pathologizing an opposing position or class of people.
Good faith disagreements are not politics, they're negotiation.
Politics is when one person/group tries to sabotage/undermine another person/group out of self-interest, even though it harms the project and reduces value.
Their self-interest becomes their top goal.
My personal take is that there are two extremes of culture. One is dedicated to engineering and management excellence. Everyone contributes. Even if there's vigorous disagreement the engine runs smoothly and Things Get Done.
The other is a snake pit of back stabbing, drama, competitive ambition, and narcissism which spreads from the c-suite down. Things still get done, sometimes, but they're poor quality - or at least much poorer than they could be. If they make it to market they'll be overhyped and oversold. (Contempt for customers and employees alike is a good tell-tale.)
No org is 100% one or the other, but those are the competing tendencies, and - of course - they're very different to work in.
Negotiation is a form of politics, not a separate thing from politics. Good faith negotiation is a principled and often relatively productive form of politics, but it remains politics nonetheless.
> out of self-interest
It's important to note that politics is as frequently driven by values as interests. This is true both in the office and in nation-states. And given that differing values often produce differing visions of excellence, a commitment to excellence doesn't spare people from the efforts/rigors of politics.
A lot of decent management books indicate politics are natural and your job as manager is to manage them. Pretending they don't exist or can be done away with is unrealistic and counter productive.
Politics in this sense is kinda negative but not really - acknowledgment that different people and groups may reasonably or unreasonably have different priorities, goals, perspectives, preferences, methodologies. I've spent most of my life under the Delusion of "reasonable people will agree if we just sit down and talk", but I no longer think that's the case (not the least because otherwise eventually you have to label everybody but yourself "unreasonable" :).
As techies often we want full, comprehensive, correct unmutable requirements, full understanding for all issues encountered, and flexibility of schedule to reach out architectural and technical goals and standards, and everything else is "office politics".
Difference exists.
Politics is trying to reconcile different perspectives priorities methods and goals. Hidden motives and deception are not necessary part of it.
> have detest for office politics
The problem is that many people on HN believe any interaction with someone with an MBA, marketing background, manager, etc. is “office politics.”