> The worst thing about politics is that you just need to hire one person who is “good at it,” and it spreads like a virus. If this person hires more people, they will most likely choose individuals who think alike. Before you know it, the whole department is infected.
> In the end, we had to let an entire department go to solve the issue.
Dropping an entire department is hard. Excising the bad employees is good in the long run, but the near term pain is a setback for the business.
One of the hardest lessons I've learned is that the most political people don't look like they're playing "politics". They might be the friendliest, most charming, most outwardly positive people you meet. The way they manipulate might be cleverly disguised as being helpful or outwardly positive.
One of the worst company politicians I dealt with had a charming way of smiling and speaking as though he was the calm voice of reason. If he wanted someone to lose status, he'd find clever ways to take them down a notch while looking like the hero.
For example, if someone was more productive or talented than he was, he would start making a lot of comments about how he was "taking extra time to mentor <person> so they have the resources they need to succeed". When his own work started falling behind, he always had a faux-humble narrative about how he spent too much time helping partner teams deliver the work he needed to complete his own tasks, even though he did nothing of the sort. Repeat this over and over again and he developed a reputation for being "too kind" and acting as the mentor for everyone, while in reality the teams were always struggling to get him to keep up. He spent a lot of time in the office rubbing elbows with execs, even though we were a remote company and he didn't even have a place to sit there. He'd often miss our meetings because he was talking to people at the office while the rest of us were working.
The politics were so obvious to me as a team member, but it blew my mind to see how well this tricks played with the management structure at the company. Management was already overworked and he was conveniently showing up to deliver them narratives and pretend to be the helpful guy. They ate it right up.
As someone who is trying to be positive, charming, and friendly in the professional world because that's the type of work environment I want to be in, how can I do that without sending red flags to my coworkers/direct reports? What can I do in order to instill a culture of grace and gratitude without coming across as playing politics?
Read Wilde's "The Devoted Friend".
https://www.wilde-online.info/the-devoted-friend.html
Hugh the Miller was one charming guy.
The Miller was positive and charming and that did not do much for poor Little Hans.
Don't be like The Miller, put aside the charm and grace and stick out your neck for others.
the answer seems to be (from the 48 laws of power):
If the world is like a giant scheming court and we are trapped inside it, there is no use in trying to opt out of the game. That will only render you powerless, and powerlessness will make you miserable. Instead of struggling against the inevitable, instead of arguing and whining and feeling guilty, it is far better to excel at power. In fact, the better you are at dealing with power, the better friend, lover, husband, wife, and person you become.
i saw this happen once and i left the company immediately. the guy in question was angling to be head of the department, i.e. my new boss. he was a real dipshit with a room temperature iq. incompetent was only the first item in a long list of issues. the dude could barely read.
at the same time, a new CTO was chosen, and his first technical all-hands was a verbal tirade about how smart he was and how you couldn't sneak anything past him. lmao. lol. i remember thinking to myself "is this guy for fucking real???" during the meeting. yes, he was for real.
current boss was also angling for a promotion so it would have been nice little maneuver. current boss tried to get me to stay after i gave my notice but even to my 22 year old self it was clear as day the direction it was all going.
in the end they got their lunch eaten by competition within a few years and everyone there left. what a pointless exercise in stupidity. i just looked - the parent company stock has gone nowhere for 15+ years during the biggest bubble in history.
ironically the ceo was a super cool dude but younger than all of his "subordinates" and i think he just got pushed around. either way, if the org is fucking up so bad even a 22 year old can see it...
> Secondly, be mindful of the company culture you create and the people you bring on board. They can either make or break your organization.
I don't think that this cautionary statement will make much of a difference, but I completely agree.
Founders deliberately create the culture of their dreams, and don't particularly care what anyone else thinks. It's a big part of the reason they are founding the endeavor. They don't want to deal with people that they believe will deter/hobble them. The boss gets what the boss wants.
In some cases, I'm sure it's worked out well.
In others ... maybe not so much.
I've found that cultures that deliver great projects are often not "comfortable" ones. In my experience, the sickest organizations have been ones where everyone was always "on the same page," and there was little disagreement.
Being "on the same page" has two forms, one of which is healthy and the other is not.
In organizations where everyone is trying to achieve the same broad goal, but have different ideas on how to achieve that goal, people are much more likely to propose novel ideas or changes which are healthy, and the business more readily adapts.
In organizations where people are just saying "yes" to whatever the person above them said, important information that needs to bubble up cannot, mistakes are made, people are thrown under the bus, and it becomes a toxic hellscape.
On the other hand, I've seen organizations where leaders were not "on the same page" and that lead to constant inter-department struggles. One would end up, by accident or intent, undermining another because they didn't have the same vision or strategy for getting there. Until someone up top is willing to lay down the law, being a manager in such an organization is effectively no different than being a politician.
I think every team/project needs a goat who will argue that the strategy being chosen is wrongheaded and will lead to problems. And who will also enthusiastically work to succeed with that strategy after being outvoted or overruled, while keeping their objections in mind and working hard to avoid them as much as possible.
Some people who have the final say can't stand a goat, and take any negativity about their vision as a cue to start figuring out how to get rid of that negativity. They often code that as a bad culture fit.
When I worked for a Japanese company, we were expected to voice objections and disagreements, during the deliberation process. However, after the decision was made, we were expected to close ranks, and fall in line.
I learned to do this.
I have found, when working with Americans, that voicing any objections (especially while being criminally old) would result in my being named a "negative naysayer," and all my input would be stricken from the record, and forevermore ignored.
It isnt always deliberate. I know companies that were two male founders of a specific race that then hired people they knew from their networks for their first few hires. All of a sudden they realized they were a 10+ person company and everyone was exactly like them.
All of a sudden, hiring anyone who wasnt very like them became difficult. Have you ever tried to hire a female for an all male company? Have you ever tried to hire a Muslim for a company that is entirely Orthodox Jewish? Sometimes you just hire who you know until you realize you've created an environment that might be very difficult to grow further.
I like people here commenting that "yes ! politics are the worst !", although the person never defines "politics", doesn't explain a bit about what happened, what went wrong, what were the reason for them quitting (not "firing themselves"), what the other people did, why they fired them or anything.
He's just rambling in the void, or did I miss something ?
Politics means partially to make tactical promises and not deliver, but to blame others for your failure while faking niceness to everyone. This also includes diverting attention to the engineering department's performance and delivery instead of your own, just because they make everything transparent and you don't. I will take your feedback and write more articles on that topic. Thank you!
I mean, maybe, but I believe in essence, politics is about building social consensus. And that has value. It might be that the consensus you are building is positive or negative for certain people, but in the end it is a tool that you need to be able to wield. Failure to do so from good people will lead to worse outcomes.
"Politics means partially to make tactical promises and not deliver, but to blame others for your failure while faking niceness to everyone."
Nope ? Politics comes from the greek "Politikos", which relate to the organization of a society (or a company in this case). You seem to put a bad behavior into a word that doesn't mean what you think.
Reading your post (I gather you are the author), you fired a whole team for "bad behavior", without explaining how you are not the problem. Maybe you aren't, but that demands explanations.
For me and for what you explained (nothing), you are the problem, and the person blaming others while faking niceness to everyone.
> The worst thing about politics is that you just need to hire one person who is “good at it,” and it spreads like a virus. If this person hires more people, they will most likely choose individuals who think alike. Before you know it, the whole department is infected.
I wish there were more concrete problems about what specific problems were caused by playing internal politics. Sometimes I think tech people use politics as a four letter word, and it often is. Sometimes it isn't.
> The worst thing about politics is that you just need to hire one person who is “good at it,” and it spreads like a virus.
Oh my goodness this is true. I’ve seen it play out myself multiple times, destroying the organization in the process. If I could filter out candidates based on this trait, all my hiring would be based on that.
The phrase "individuals who think alike", what does that mean?
One business mantra goes: "If two people always agree, one is not needed"
My ego gets a boost when people agree with my solutions but my intellect prefers to hear the rebuttals or even better, insights. People may tell you that they are driven by intellectual pursuits. Not true. We all want to feel good about what we do.
So.
What am I getting at?
Not everything that shine is work.
I think this is one of those rare circumstances where the article would have actually been better if it were longer. I've got almost no idea what actually happened here or why.
Recite from an eldritch cursed hand-crafted copy of "How to Win Friends and Influence People" written in blood, backwards and upside down, under full moonlight, in an eerily silent forest clearing.
I was forced to read that book and 'how to be a superstar'. Due to a manager who disliked my bluntness in saying things were broken. He wanted me to punch it up with doublespeak to make him feel better.
They show how to manipulate people. But not solid advice on how to do the right thing.
Honestly, I read the book about 15 years ago and my takeaway at that time was that... actually, It's OK to be nice to people and to let your desire to help them manifest itself. At that point in my life I was kind of a little shit and was utterly paranoid of being taken advantage of and viewed interactions very transactional.
So, yeah... That's not what I took from that book at all. Maybe I should read it again because maybe it's not really as I remember it, since so many people seem to hate it?
I feel like a lot of people judge "How to Win Friends and Influence People" literally by the cover. Its main message is to continually improve your own character. (What I took away anyway)
While there are definitely some toxic books out there (the "## laws of power", as an example. I don't remember what the number was but it was two digits), I don't think How to Win Friends is one of them.
Maybe I worded that a bit strongly. As the reasons for me having to read it still irk me. But the root is how to draw people in by being nicer. It is a form of manipulation and not true to who you are. Now given that there is nothing wrong with improving yourself to be less of a jerk. Those books do have that sort of advice. But the advice is given with the intention of manipulation. I may be being harsh on them. But that was my takeaway. Decent advice but bad intentions.
I think the once perfectly ordinary idiom of “winning friends” has fallen out of usage in the (many) decades since that book was written, to the extent that people now – just like you here – read something nefarious into it that wasn’t originally there at all.
Can we petition HN somehow to refuse posting pay-wall or app-wall links? Unless HN is encouraging its users to circumvent these features, which is in the hacker spirit but certainly dubious on the business relations front.
> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic[0]. More here[1].
Surely the HN moderators are not legally obligated to chase rogue bots on multiple usernames for unrelated third parties. It wouldn't be "spammy" so they'd have no need to react to it for their own moderation duties. The DMCA claims seem thin in any case especially considering SCOTUS's reaffirmation of Section 230. I don't think iterating through hypothetical legal arguments is very useful without the attendant analysis.
> In the end, we had to let an entire department go to solve the issue.
Dropping an entire department is hard. Excising the bad employees is good in the long run, but the near term pain is a setback for the business.
One of the hardest lessons I've learned is that the most political people don't look like they're playing "politics". They might be the friendliest, most charming, most outwardly positive people you meet. The way they manipulate might be cleverly disguised as being helpful or outwardly positive.
One of the worst company politicians I dealt with had a charming way of smiling and speaking as though he was the calm voice of reason. If he wanted someone to lose status, he'd find clever ways to take them down a notch while looking like the hero.
For example, if someone was more productive or talented than he was, he would start making a lot of comments about how he was "taking extra time to mentor <person> so they have the resources they need to succeed". When his own work started falling behind, he always had a faux-humble narrative about how he spent too much time helping partner teams deliver the work he needed to complete his own tasks, even though he did nothing of the sort. Repeat this over and over again and he developed a reputation for being "too kind" and acting as the mentor for everyone, while in reality the teams were always struggling to get him to keep up. He spent a lot of time in the office rubbing elbows with execs, even though we were a remote company and he didn't even have a place to sit there. He'd often miss our meetings because he was talking to people at the office while the rest of us were working.
The politics were so obvious to me as a team member, but it blew my mind to see how well this tricks played with the management structure at the company. Management was already overworked and he was conveniently showing up to deliver them narratives and pretend to be the helpful guy. They ate it right up.