I actually love "office politics" when people engage in it in good faith. I love crossing team boundaries, figuring out who is not talking to whom, who works well with certain kind of people. I love running good meetings and making sure everybody is heard. I love writing and editing documents, cleaning up meeting notes, I am happy writing whatever shitty glue I need to to make other people's work smoother.
I think office politics is just a derisive name for the very important work of having lots of people of different backgrounds work with each other towards a same goal. I've come to understand that my biggest technical capability as an engineer is to play office politics well. Organizing a single meeting between two people (or conversely, making sure two people never have to code review each other) can be the difference between a dead project and a successful one.
The "mind games" is specifically about getting me to say something I can't stand behind. I am fine doing things I can't stand behind, because I'd rather get something janky shipped than nothing at all, and I will do so without complaining, in fact I enjoy it. But don't expect me to say something I don't mean, I'd rather say nothing at all. I have two anecdotes come to mind. One is a colleague not wanting to use the API I provided to store configuration files (an API I provided so they wouldn't have to deal with the versioning, saving to flash safely, validation and encryption), instead repeatedly bringing up in the public slack channel how I should KISS and that writing a file is really not a complicated thing (it kind of is, especially in an embedded system). I don't really care too much about engaging with people calling me stupid in public, and I'm certainly not going to say that writing a file is simple.
I also care very much about other more junior engineers not getting bullied by older engineers. Junior engineers might not be very nuanced in their opinions, or might need to learn a few lessons the hard way, but that is not done by playing the authority card, that is done by providing a safe space for them to discover these things on their own (be it by mentoring, by watching more experienced people do it, or by giving them enough ownership to be able to make a few mistakes without impacting the business).
> The "mind games" is specifically about getting me to say something I can't stand behind.
Cool, that's a great clarification. I agree with that characterization of "mind games", and its obviously 100% legitimate to stand your ground in those cases.
One reason I think these things happen is because people go straight from school to the corporate world where they expect to be told what to do and never develop their own agency and feedback loops for higher level goals. In a big org it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. Silicon Valley youth worship doesn't help either as it takes time to get enough experience to learn the myriad different ways things can succeed and fail. Young managers often feel they need to have all the answers and control everything rather than realizing the job is really about understanding individual strengths and giving everyone the right incentives and well-defined goals (appropriate to their competence level) to work together and produce output greater than the sum of the parts.
I actually love "office politics" when people engage in it in good faith. I love crossing team boundaries, figuring out who is not talking to whom, who works well with certain kind of people. I love running good meetings and making sure everybody is heard. I love writing and editing documents, cleaning up meeting notes, I am happy writing whatever shitty glue I need to to make other people's work smoother.
I think office politics is just a derisive name for the very important work of having lots of people of different backgrounds work with each other towards a same goal. I've come to understand that my biggest technical capability as an engineer is to play office politics well. Organizing a single meeting between two people (or conversely, making sure two people never have to code review each other) can be the difference between a dead project and a successful one.
The "mind games" is specifically about getting me to say something I can't stand behind. I am fine doing things I can't stand behind, because I'd rather get something janky shipped than nothing at all, and I will do so without complaining, in fact I enjoy it. But don't expect me to say something I don't mean, I'd rather say nothing at all. I have two anecdotes come to mind. One is a colleague not wanting to use the API I provided to store configuration files (an API I provided so they wouldn't have to deal with the versioning, saving to flash safely, validation and encryption), instead repeatedly bringing up in the public slack channel how I should KISS and that writing a file is really not a complicated thing (it kind of is, especially in an embedded system). I don't really care too much about engaging with people calling me stupid in public, and I'm certainly not going to say that writing a file is simple.
I also care very much about other more junior engineers not getting bullied by older engineers. Junior engineers might not be very nuanced in their opinions, or might need to learn a few lessons the hard way, but that is not done by playing the authority card, that is done by providing a safe space for them to discover these things on their own (be it by mentoring, by watching more experienced people do it, or by giving them enough ownership to be able to make a few mistakes without impacting the business).
Thanks again for your comment.