What does "playing politics" mean for software engineers?Software engineers are often told to “start playing politics”, but most engineers have no idea what that means.

Their reference point for “playing politics” comes from fiction like Game of Thrones. Are they supposed to raise an army and depose the CEO, or poison each other at team lunch? Should they book Zoom calls with each other and plot schemes? All of that is obviously ridiculous. In terms of Game of Thrones, software engineers are not lords and ladies. We’re the soldiers and workers of the realm. So you should think about “playing politics” in the way a castle guard would, not one of the major players.

The castle guard are not going around poisoning people or forming coalitions between the great powers. They are largely keeping their heads down. But in order to do that, they have to stay aware of the political currents, or they’re liable to do something catastrophically stupid: for instance, making an enemy of a powerful courtier, or arresting somebody who’s on an important mission for the king.

Given that, the basic principles of playing politics are something like this:

Be aware of who’s powerful and who’s not

At all costs, avoid making powerful enemies

Help powerful people as best you can

Make sure they know you’re helping them (without annoying them)

Be aware of who’s powerful and who’s not

As a software engineer in a large company, you will not be a powerful person . Powerful people are typically in senior management: VPs, directors, and so on1. However, not everyone in senior management is powerful. Some are killers who have the active support of the CEO, while others are confused incompetents.

How do you know which is which? If someone is clearly ferociously competent, they’re always going to have some power, since upper management tend not to ignore useful tools. But you can’t rely on competence as your only guide. Some managers are powerful for other reasons: they’re friends with the CEO, or they have strong relationships with other groups like legal or sales, or they’re simply willing to do whatever upper management wants done.

One signal is who’s leading the important projects. Read your CEO or CTO’s internal updates and pay attention to the projects that are called out by name. Organizations tend to give key tasks to trusted lieutenants. If a manager is leading an area that’s never under the spotlight, they probably don’t have enough clout.

Another signal is hiring. Is a manager’s team growing or shrinking? Particularly post-ZIRP, headcount is a rare and precious resource. A manager who’s able to get it is likely a powerful manager, or at least is reporting to a powerful director or VP (which often amounts to the same thing).

At all costs, avoid making powerful enemies

First, you should try not to make any enemies at all. Most software engineers who get “playing politics” wrong do it by needlessly alienating people: by being rude, unhelpful, abrasive, making non-technical people feel stupid, and so on. This post isn’t really about that. I’m assuming that you can figure out how to be a generically pleasant person on your own.

However, competent software engineers will make some enemies . If you’re out there making projects happen, some people aren’t going to like the way you do it, and won’t be a fan of any compromise you offer. I wrote about this in Big tech engineers need big egos: the only way to avoid making enemies is to change nothing, but that’s incompatible with doing the job.

Given that, be selective about which enemies you make. If you’re making a technical decision that’s either going to require work from team A or team B, and neither team wants to do it, you should try to pick the team with the least political cover. If you need a powerful VP’s team to do something they won’t like, try to be maximally respectful about it: get that team’s core engineers on-side if you can, or book a meeting with the powerful manager and explain the situation, or (better yet) ask the powerful manager sponsoring your project to go and talk to the other VP for you. (If you don’t have a powerful manager like this, consider abandoning your project).

Give way to powerful managers when at all possible. Every so often you really do have to stand your ground — if the system will truly collapse otherwise, or a major customer will have an incident, or if the technical decision really is entirely bone-headed — but almost all cases are not like this. The best advice I’ve ever gotten about playing politics came from a manager I worked with long ago2:

This is not the hill you want to die on.

When I’m about to pick a fight or say something argumentative, and I’m not 100% convinced it’s necessary, I ask myself: is this the hill I want to die on? And it never is.

The three rules about disagreeing with powerful people are:

Make sure you do it in private

Be polite

When they overrule you, stop arguing immediately

Disagreeing in private...