Does technical incompetence and politics go hand in hand?
Posted by Elect_SaturnMutex@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 111 comments
So I have observed this recurring pattern in my career which has led me to believe that this is how the system is. Like, everywhere, all around the world.
I have seen people who are not very technically skilled being in positions that demand technical skills to solve problems. But when there are other people in the team who are more technically skilled, they try to do politics and sideline people who are technically skilled, but not too socially competent. I think its unfair that technically unskilled people are hired by incompetent managers and skilled people stay unemployed. I think this is a pattern, or maybe I am just biased.
Is this a pattern you have observed?
LittleLordFuckleroy1@reddit
They’re just different skills. I’ve known people who are absolutely brilliant on a technical level, but do not have the social leadership skills to drive efforts at a high level.
Requirements are human. Implementations are technical. Being good at navigating one does not inherently imply being good at navigating the other.
psyyduck@reddit
My experience is smart people are smart. Even if they're bad at anything, it's so much easier for them to learn it. I recommend anyone hang out with high school dropouts to gain perspective.
LittleLordFuckleroy1@reddit
All I’m saying is that I know a ton of genius savants who were absolutely incapable of directing a team.
psyyduck@reddit
Yeah and I met a lot of dumbasses in grad school. I'm just saying have some perspective. It's kinda like this
High school or less: Trump 62, Harris 36.
Postgraduate degree: Trump 38, Harris 59.
source
sharpcoder29@reddit
Moron: Trump or Harris Savant: Stein or De La Cruz
Odd_Reputation7687@reddit
what's the context behind this part
sharpcoder29@reddit
By 20 year experience is that higher ups are not very technically skilled. They get other people to do the work for them to make them look good.
znick5@reddit
No.. I have worked with plenty of trash engineers who are not politically aware at all. I have also worked with great engineers who are very politically versed.
Survivorship bias. Good engineers who are also good at politics move up and out of your direct circle of interaction more often and quicker than engineers lacking one of the two.
juriglx@reddit
This implies that you are also an engineer lacking one of the two, since you're the one left behind.
znick5@reddit
Yeah.. didn't want to say that but it's true. The fact that OP is "observing" this means he is lacking one of the two unfortunately.
sunflower_love@reddit
Maybe OP works for a small company—in which case the only “up and out” from your circle is people leaving the company.
The dynamic OP described is arguably one that is more likely to show up in smaller companies as well…
Which sure, I’ve seen that working at mainly small companies myself. The best folks often do end up leaving.
However, good people can be stuck on shitty teams for reasons other than their own competence. Could just be low confidence/bad market/passivity. That doesn’t say anything directly about OP’s technical or social skills.
Now that I’m typing this all out though, you could easily argue that confidence/drive is necessary to be considered a good engineer…
Feel free to shit on me for this—just wanted to share an alternate perspective.
NormalAccounts@reddit
Communication is huge and the best engineers know how to communicate well. It also takes confidence and EQ to communicate well. Drive is also important as it displays motivation, responsiveness and accountability. So no you're spot on.
znick5@reddit
Yeah absolutely. Up and out often means leaving for bigger opportunities.
I would say your confidence and social skills are more a part of your political reputation, but they can also be part of your technical results as well. What category you place it in doesn't matter too much really. What's important is recognizing that it is important to your success.
psyyduck@reddit
This is not necessarily a bad thing. It only takes a glance at politicians and corporate leadership today to understand. Individuals with psychopathic and sociopathic traits are over-represented in leadership positions compared to the general population.
fallen_lights@reddit
Or both?
BusEquivalent9605@reddit
yes. in my experience, it’s best to be good at both and you need to be decent at both but you will move up faster if you great socially and decent engineering-wise than if you are great engineering-wise and only decent socially. People decide who gets promoted, not computers (yet?)
Horror_Ice217@reddit
sounds like a management issue more than anything else
8004612286@reddit
Not promoting someone that's technically competent, but socially incompetent is the correct decision considering the amount of people they must work with. So no, not really.
znick5@reddit
How so?
oupablo@reddit
Of course both exist. That's just a numbers game. The question is do people whose political prowess outshines their technical abilities, which is to they are say easier to talk to and more persuasive, tend to find themselves in positions they're not qualified for. When phrased this way, I think most people would say "yes". You can move up if you're great at selling yourself even if what you delivered isn't great. It's borderline impossible to move up above a given circle, one still in most peoples direct circle, if you aren't top of mind for your superiors.
Appropriate_Base_184@reddit
text kinda reminds me of something i read in high school
amrelnaggar@reddit
I think it is just human nature. Having someone more skilled than yourself in the room while you are not naturally on their good side will turn you into a political maniac, parroting “he’s not that good”.
MidnightBlades@reddit
Feels like a lot of people in these comments never had a toxic boss/chain of command and actually try to gaslight poor op with their american startup "corporate" koolaid and pinning the observation on something op lacks. A lot of tech startups are people like the rest of us, and people can be shitty. Especially when sociopaths are abundent with boomers and gen x in the industry. Usually those who barely pass on the technical competency side of the job market themselves as these ultra capable managers. Unfortunately this leads to 3 options: A. They are good managers and actually know how to manage people B. They are found out and fired C. They lie through their teeth and play politics to secure their position.
Option c is pretty much what he's describing, and just look at the great leadership and total truths and no lies of the tech industry, where we wouldn't think about firing 30,000 thousand employees via email sent at 6am the day of. Where investors need to know the truth and will do their due diligence and won't create a bubble and risk the livelihood of billions of people for capital gains.
Best way to deal with these people is to set strong boundaries, record everything and expose their sometimes blatantly illegal behaviour so if anything happens you can make sure you'll get paid for your actual work + the incompetence their politics bring to the work environment, be it stress or actual damage that they cause and try to pin on anyone but themselves.
There's a whole pipeline for these people with their fail upwards approach to life, and their whole MO is to make everything look like it will fall apart if they are fired while simultaneously being the root cause for all the chaos.
New-Locksmith-126@reddit
You've hit the nail of the head. I really wonder how many of the comments are from experienced devs. The naiveté mixed with callousness is so depressing.
Crafty-Pool7864@reddit
This happens all the time but “fair” is the mating call of the loser.
When you observe an API doesn’t behave the way you expect, you work around it.
When humans don’t behave “fairly”, you complain.
Get good. Learn better social skills and get yourself some power, then you can decide the culture other people operate in.
New-Locksmith-126@reddit
American mindset
Regular_Zombie@reddit
Politics is a skill too. You use 'politics' as a pejorative but all groups of more than one person have politics. It's about deciding who gets what, when and how. In just about all cases there are more wants than resources and politics is the process where those resources are allocated.
New-Locksmith-126@reddit
Burglary is a skill too.
CodelinesNL@reddit
If you're as smart as you think you are you'd be better at the political games as these people you're complaining about, not worse.
To my it sounds like what you see as "technically skilled" are the developers who overengineer crap, don't play well with others, and don't understand that their job isn't "writing as many lines of code as possible".
New-Locksmith-126@reddit
Go back to JIRA clown
bwmat@reddit
Maybe they're smart and don't want to pay politics
I mean, you can characterize or as 'stupid' to have scruples too if you want...
CodelinesNL@reddit
He's pretending that being socially skilled = playing political games. That's the core of the issue. He isn't aware wat working in a team is about.
He was also talking about people being unable to "play politics", not being unwilling. That's ability versus choice.
Real_Square1323@reddit
Most of us have better things to do.
New-Locksmith-126@reddit
The absolute regurgitation of MBA talking points in this thread is sad.
Of course, you need to be sociable, but what the real winners have is sociopathy.
CEOs are mostly sociopaths and its no surprise the companies they run are zero sum hunger games.
Fuck them and their "social skills".
Wide-Pop6050@reddit
The thing is the skillset for a manager and an engineer are different. So someone may be a good manager but not a good engineer - and that's perfectly valid. You just don't know what you don't know.
Low_Satisfaction_819@reddit
Yes, I see this play out everywhere. The thing is, if you look at the most successful companies in the world currently, they were built and run by technical people. This primarily seems to happen at companies somewhere in the middle.
Skullclownlol@reddit
Built maybe, but not owned and not run. It's a common trope that technical leadership gets treated like an employee or partial owner and eventually replaced by profit-first businesspeople that take over.
Low_Satisfaction_819@reddit
Meta, Tesla, SpaceX, Google, Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Block, Stripe were all built (and are still run) by engineers.
djnattyp@reddit
Built and launched by technical people. Then "consolidated" and "enshittified" by slimy management and money people.
Fancy_Number_754@reddit
sounds like a case of "who you know" over "what you know
rayfrankenstein@reddit
Companies tend to reward visibility more than technical prowess.
You can your spend your limited units of mana on either making a small amount of work you do very visible or doing a large amount of invisible work.
Promotions tend to select for people who make small amounts of work very visible. And people who get promoted that way tend to promote other people just like them.
BoBoBearDev@reddit
No. In fact, I have to raise yellow flags when you believe a person with both technical and social competence is enough to lead. Because Phil Spencer is one example, he has both and driven the Xbox ecosystem to the ground.
Just because he knows the technical side and the charisma to rally the devoted followers. He ultimately ran the Xbox ecosystem to the ground.
If you really want to know what's good, nVidia CEO has a more down to Earth definition. A smart person requires good intuition beyond the technical skills or trained leadership skills.
There is a major disconnect between knowledge and wisdom. Just because someone has all the knowledge, doesn't mean they have the wisdom to wield them.
And team failed often because the leader cannot balance control and freedom properly, so the team swing to either extreme.
The same with nVidia example, do you know they can shit on GPU performance if they want to maximize CUDA performance right? That's what most CEO would do, and that's how it could have shot themselves in the foot. You can bitch out his DLSS1,2,3,4,5 investment, but they still made the best GPU for running video games. That is wisdom.
Back in the days, we just call it common sense. But since common sense is no longer common, we have to label it more explicitly as intuition or wisdom.
A non technical leader doesn't need to know all the technical skills because they can easily hire the technical people to do the analysis, suggestions, and design. What matters the most is, once those data is presented, do that have the right wisdom to pick a solutions that satisfy both short term and long term goals. And they have the wisdom to know those goals are actually right, not just to make bunch of devoted followers to mark territories.
Ginden@reddit
It's Berkson's paradox.
And to paraphrase next sentence in Wikipedia's article:
And those who are both get hired at top companies.
Skullclownlol@reddit
If it's Berkson's paradox, then doesn't that imply that yes OP is right? Because Berkson's says that the negative correlation doesn't exist (since the real population isn't being observed), but it also does mean that the population had to pass the selection first.
The dating pool example on the wiki is a good comparison. It's not that technical incompetence and politics go hand in hand (in the complete population). But since companies are self-selecting for "high standards", they're indeed self-selecting to create this bias, and it indeed does exist within the biased sample.
Since Berkson's is a sampling bias, not a logical fallacy.
SakishimaHabu@reddit
Neat
takingphotosmakingdo@reddit
Add me as an example of the unemployed
Elect_SaturnMutex@reddit (OP)
I genuinely hope and wish you find something soon.
takingphotosmakingdo@reddit
Same, cheers
TheOwlHypothesis@reddit
I would argue the governing factor for both is intelligence.
The fact of the matter is there is no universal law or "justice" that means being technically skilled automatically lowers your skills in social competence, or vice versa. Some people are just simply brilliant all around.
The more intelligent you are in general the better you'll perform in both areas.
This isn't meant to be a dig, just the facts.
I've seen some very brilliant engineers also have the sharpest political wit. I cut my teeth on politics in consulting before I got out. It was real game of thrones type shit.
Luckily (or unfortunately), in addition to being a huge technical asset myself, I also learned I'm really good at the dumb politics stuff. I don't like to use my brain for that, but if need be, I'm glad I at least can "defend" myself.
Now that I'm out of consulting, and in tech, the politics compared to consulting is lightweight stuff.
-Knockabout@reddit
I don't think there's really a single "intelligence" factor to point at that makes you more likely to be good at everything though...engineering and management are completely different skills that use completely different parts of the brain.
TheOwlHypothesis@reddit
Sure, and that's not really what I said. You're arguing against "one trait explains everything". I said broad intelligence helps both with technical work and political/strategic work. Different domains, but not unrelated. Of course it's not the only variable. But "different skills exist" doesn't refute the existence of a general factor that helps across both.
Elect_SaturnMutex@reddit (OP)
Yea my emotional intelligence is pretty low. Add to that bad experiences wires your nervous system in a certain way. I need to put effort to change that. What's the difference in consultancy and tech? One could work in a technical consultancy no?
TheOwlHypothesis@reddit
Consulting in general is just a lot of power games. People live and breathe based on who you know and who has the power. And everyone wants the power.
In tech I've found people are more likely to actually want to be pro social and work together and share information freely. In consulting you only shared stuff with your allies.
And yes, good question! I was a technical consultant
throwaway0134hdj@reddit
Ppl who don’t know how to play office politics or are autistic get screwed over.
sqquima@reddit
A: - I'm autistic Good B: - Thanks. Let's work together to see how I can best communicate with you. Bad B: - Thanks. I have no idea how to deal with that, so I'll keep treating you as someone who isn't. Ugly B: - Thanks. Now I know how to throw you under the bus if I ever need to.
throwaway0134hdj@reddit
Hate to say it, if you are autistic don’t tell anyone this. I’ve seen Ugly B play out numerous times…
Sunstorm84@reddit
Im autistic but I moved up to staff level within about 3 years of starting my career. Nothing is absolute.
SlaimeLannister@reddit
Of course — the individualized anarchy of the capitalist labor economy rewards resource misallocation. This should be a trivial observation for a technically competent systems thinker such as yourself.
PartyParrotGames@reddit
Think it's more Peter Principle than anything leading to incompetent managers. Once they're in place, their own incompetence is the core driver making them mishandle their talent pool.
Elect_SaturnMutex@reddit (OP)
This is so true. In fact, i heard of Peter Principle for the first time from an ex colleague during my time with them. And this colleague was really competent and experienced. He was also sidelined as a reward for being loyal for so many years.
bentreflection@reddit
People like to do what they're good at. This leads to people who are good at politics working it more often and people who are technically skilled but bad at politics to focus more on technical stuff. But there are plenty of people who are great at both and do both well.
pacman2081@reddit
Darwinism at work here. If you are technically incompetent and political fool, you are not surviving for too long in the industry. There are technical folks who are adept at political side of things. Some of them rise up middle management
Elect_SaturnMutex@reddit (OP)
When they become managers, do they stop thinking like devs? Or work in the interest of the company? Since they are conditioned to work on the non-technical side of things, every day? And they have a senior dev on their side who advise them? At least I have observed that pattern.
Weekly_Assignment693@reddit
You’re really close to answering your own question. Devs and managers both SHOULD work for the interest of the company. Sometimes managers need to realign priorities to that interest, at the detriment of what individual contributors see as valuable (bug fixes, architecture changes, clean code, documentation).
In my experience bigger picture thinking is what comes with managerial responsibility
Xerxero@reddit
Work is just high school for older folks.
nachohk@reddit
I see a lot of comments interpreting lack of politics or social competence and commenting on this as a lack of basic intelligence. But it would be very obviously wrong to suggest that no one is both technically competent and an able communicator, so I don't think that's an interesting thing to discuss.
I am very experienced and skilled with technical matters. I also happen to be an effective communicator, with a reasonably strong volunteer background in both teaching and writing/proofreading/editing. My problem is not that I am intellectually incapable of politics, my problem is that I have no fucking patience whatsoever for any chucklefuck who sees me as little more than the next step to trod on as they make their way up to some vapid fucking job title where they can do more damage than ever to everyone else's jobs. I can see what they are doing, and I will choose whatever path is the least demanding of my limited time and energy to point them at something or someone else, so I can be left in peace to get on with what I'm good at.
And this is a pattern I do observe. The most technically competent people are those who are genuinely focused on excellence in their work, and people who are focused on the excellence of their work have little patience for office drama and politics.
Elect_SaturnMutex@reddit (OP)
I agree, people who are willing to step on others for their own gain are psychos. The last para resonates a lot with me. I just want to work on cool projects, develop and deliver cool stuff and I have no tolerance for drama and politics.
account22222221@reddit
Think about music.
Some songs have really simple or stupid lyrics but the music itself is amazing and the song works because of the music.
Other music has simple music but really strong lyrics. That works too.
Some songs do have both, but many songs would not be improved by having both because haves strong music in a lyrics focused song distracts from the strength of the other.
Tech projects are the same. Some are carried on the strength of the organization and people skills. Some are carried by technical acumen. Many projects NEED one or the other and not both.some rare ones need both.
That’s is generally defined by the problem, but it can also be defined by leadership styles.
So TLDR: both approaches work. Sometimes either approach can work. Those without technical skills might cover themselves with other skills. Sometimes particular problems NEED one or the other. Don’t assume because someone isn’t technical they aren’t useful. We here are typically very technical by nature and have a tendency to frame all problems as technical because that is our training. Moving beyond that mindset is the important to becoming a very effective very senior developer
Elect_SaturnMutex@reddit (OP)
Yea and finding musicians at the same length is also hard, just like finding the right developers for a team, imho. :)
ntzm_@reddit
What does "politics" mean in this situation? I don't think I've ever been in a team where I see this behaviour.
ehmpee@reddit
My repeated observation is that technically skilled but socially inept employees can completely miss the point of an orgs' objectives.
They are very aware they are more technically competent than their managers and peers (this is usually the case) and mistake that for knowing better than their managers about what their goals are.
Often all their skills are wasted because they are not applying them to their orgs' goals.
That's why they are sidelined.
avoid_pro@reddit
What if you can’t adapt them? Move to another company?
Individual_Resist625@reddit
it's frustrating when politics overshadow skills. seen it happen in a few places too
alienangel2@reddit
"social competence" and "understanding your orgs objectives" doesn't mean "politics".
TadpoleNo1549@reddit
yeah this does happen more often than people admit, it’s not always about skill, a lot of it comes down to communication, visibility and how people position themselves in a team, sometimes less technical people move up because they’re better at managing perception, not necessarily solving problems, but also worth checking bias a bit, there are plenty of strong engineers who just aren’t visible or don’t advocate for themselves, feels unfair for sure, but the game isn’t just technical anymore, it’s a mix of skill + communication + awareness
KathieJ98@reddit
I think you're pattern-matching on something real but drawing the wrong conclusion from it. the people you're calling "technically unskilled" often actually do have technical chops, they just also figured out that past a certain level the job stops being about solving technical problems and starts being about getting other people aligned on which problems to solve.
I've worked with brilliant engineers who mass-produced elegant code that nobody asked for while the "political" person in the room was the one who kept the team from building the wrong thing for 6 months. that said, yeah, genuinely incompetent people absolutely do use politics to cover for it and I've seen that too, especially in orgs where the feedback loops are slow enough that nobody notices for a while. the hard part is telling the 2 apart, and in my experience most of us default to assuming it's the second case when we're frustrated.
SeaMisx@reddit
Yes and it is so prevalent that it made the world we live in today as it is.
Spimflagon@reddit
Let me suggest a counterpoint: some developers undervalue social skills in technical roles.
It seems like a lot of the time, developers who are extremely technically skilled complain that colleagues who are "political" get promoted ahead of them. And maybe that's the case.
But it's only one side of the story; I do know that a lot of technical developers don't appreciate that a large part in any job, especially with a senior or management component, is dealing with people. To them, the person who writes the best code should get the best job. And it makes me think that maybe to those people, seeing people who turn out worse code but are easier to work with being promoted ahead of them, or hired ahead of them, looks like injustice.
Even in a technical field like software development, you're working in a group with other people. And people are going to give you preference if they enjoy working with you. Because we're people, and not just functionaries to produce the optimal output.
DigThatData@reddit
it seems like in many bureaucracies, politics is the art of getting other people to do your job for you.
OptimalGanache7900@reddit
not really in my experience - it's more about insecurity than incompetence. seen plenty of strong engineers play just as dirty when they feel threatened
CompassionateSkeptic@reddit
Short answer: No. And I think your biases are playing the dominant role in what you’re seeing.
Longer —
You’re right that the soft skills required to establish alignment and be perceived as competent often never see a reckoning—they don’t often need technical skills holding them up. That is a huge problem in the industry. It can feel outrageous and unjust and we should want to fix that (unfortunately, as a society, the US has vilified some of the remedies to that problem, but we’ll treat that as a tangent). The fact that’s so frustrating and salient means confirmation bias is much harder to control for.
And on the other side of the equation you have some circular reason, though it’s perfectly understandable and I can’t fault you for it. What you’re really doing is **stipulating** that there’s a level of lacking soft-skills that obscures technical competencies. Then, in the same breath, saying they’re being sidelined or persecuted. If their soft skills aren’t letting their technical skills shine through to the people who make the decisions that could leverage those technical skills, how do we know they’re being sidelined? What’s the other option here—the decision-makers seeing through the haze? What’s the mechanism that allows this to happen and if it’s being undermined, how and where?
If these folks are being marginalized or persecuted, make sure you’re identifying that part of your observation. You’ll know because it’d be happening to people with and without the soft skills that help a person shine. It may not be happening equally if soft skills can help a person counter it, but it wouldn’t be limited to only those lacking. If it’s only happening to folks who would also have trouble shining without the perceived sidelining, the observation is equivocal and our biases are favoring one explanation over the other without the clear rationale to pick one.
throwaway_0x90@reddit
By definition if someone is in a job that they objectively cannot do, but somehow hasn't been terminated then that means they are using politics or legal shielding. There is no other possibility unless that person owns the company.
But also, I think it's toxic behavior to be worrying this much about other people and using terms like "incompetent" to describe coworkers.
Elect_SaturnMutex@reddit (OP)
I am not worrying about other people. I consider myself incompetent too in comparison to engineers who are probably more skilled in other companies. You are right it can be viewed as toxic behavior, I need to work on it, but working in such an environment is worse. Especially when you don't have a lot of choices in a market like today.
geeeffwhy@reddit
i certainly thought this kind of thing early on, and my belief in the premise decreased the more experience i had, because it became clear that a lot of what looks like technical competence stymied by politics is in fact a lack of perspective meeting tradeoffs outside one’s circle of competence. put another way, you can be entirely right about the pure technical question while being entirely wrong about the needs of the business.
i mean also, since all of this is about success in human organizations, and politics is about navigating human organizations, those who have a greater facility with politics will ascend within those organizations. how could it be otherwise?
gurudennis@reddit
Survivorship bias. Those without technical skills or skills at politicking didn't last. Those who have both don't need to play too much politics to succeed, and in any case are probably smarter on average, thus more subtle with their politics.
3rdPoliceman@reddit
No more than inability to comprehend interpersonal dynamics goes with technical mastery.
beefyweefles@reddit
There’s definitely ethnic nepotism, and in my experience their technical skill is dirt poor and their in-group bias is egregiously high and completely shameless
thecodingart@reddit
Technically incompetent people in technical influencing positions protect themselves with a political barrier
grundee@reddit
What does "do politics" mean? No one "does politics." These people aren't lvl 20 Politimancers, waving their +1 enchanted Scrum Staffs, banishing engineers to technical obscurity. Specific things are said to specific people, and this results in the outcomes you see. It isn't magic, and you don't need to be a social butterfly to think about this concretely.
First, focus on the outcome. You are being sidelined, perhaps by not having the opportunity to work on the next big project. Who decides who works on what projects? Have you talked to that person ever? Who decides what you work on? Can you tell them you want to work on the project?
Next, focus on how you got to the outcome. You think a non-technically skilled person said something that got you sidelined. What could they have said? Did they say you did a bad job on something? What was it? What was the feedback? Do the people who decide who works on what see your actual output, or just what someone else says?
Finally, why do they do this? Perhaps it threatens their position. Imagine that you somehow got hired as a college football coach making $1m a year. You know very little about football, certainly not enough to be a coach. The optimal thing to do in this situation though is to hang on to this job for as long as you possibly can to make as much money as you can before they either learn you know jack about football or you figure enough out to get by. People who actually are more qualified for your position are a threat to you, since they shine a light on you. How would you act in this situation? Is it similar to what you see from this other person?
People use "politics" to mean "all that messy stuff I don't understand so it looks like magic to me," but it's not magic, it's strategy. IMO if you can figure out how to win at Magic: The Gathering you have the skills to navigate corporate politics. It's just actions, reactions, and outcomes with a different game mechanic.
alienangel2@reddit
Rarely yes but when you say
What exactly are you expecting? A socially incompetent senior engineer generally isn't useful to an organization if their flavour of social incompetence stops them from being a good communicator or leader. So it falls on whoever else is left to figure out how to actually get stuff built and launched that makes money.
Maybe if you're working on some hard quant problem its still valuable to have a pair of autists who can't work together siloed in their own lab doing their own thing and unable to mentor anyone new and unwilling to engage with people in a different org to resolve a point of contention, but for 90% of us working on routine enterprise software, those guys are not useful, however technically skilled they might be.
justUseAnSvm@reddit
The primary competence for organizations is social skills, so it's not uncommon to see people who are good technically, but an absolute headache to work with, get sidelined. I've seen great engineers fall flat because they aren't easy to work with, and don't navigate the organization very well.
Where I sort of fall now, is that technical skills only get you so far in an organization, it's not really "playing politics", but just being a corporate operator that allows you to have the most impact. A lot of big tech teams are filled with brilliant engineers, but being a brilliant engineer alone does not mean you get to shape decisions.
TehCheator@reddit
I'd argue that those weren't great engineers. Too many engineers (even in the age of AI) forget that the job isn't to write code; it's to further the goals of the business. Doing so requires understanding what those goals are, how your team fits into those goals, and what you can do to have the most impact. Doing all of that requires collaboration with others.
Especially with the growth and improvements in LLMs, being able to write awesome code is becoming less and less of a differentiator.
znick5@reddit
Furthering business goals does not equal easy or enjoyable to work with... Your impact can be generating tons of revenue and aligned with all of the right goals, but you can still piss off the wrong person and get sidelined or let go. It happens. These are both important but separate parts of your success within an org that require different skills.
TehCheator@reddit
Very true that both sets of skills are important. The main point I was aiming at was that the vast majority of software doesn’t get made in a vacuum. Building software of any real size requires collaboration with others. If you’re a lone wolf who’s hard to work with, the level of impact you can realistically have is going to be capped at what code you can write yourself.
Great engineers can do so much more than that because they can work with others to accomplish bigger projects.
znick5@reddit
Yeah for sure, I agree mostly. I will just point out that you are talking about software of "size" and "bigger projects", but how "big" your project or work is only represents a piece of the whole picture.
Lone wolfs that get sidelined often still complete and get given big projects. For example I knew a guy years ago who was a super early engineer at a company that grew to over a thousand. He worked directly with founders from practically the start. yet he was just a technical manager/lead of a single small team... The CTO would go directly to him with projects that nobody else usually wanted for various reasons. He could accomplish hard engineering tasks, lead large projects, generate rev, but how he worked with others stopped him from navigating that growth to the top. If he had all the pieces of the puzzle he would have easily been an SVP/VP level with hundreds of reports.
shifty_lifty_doodah@reddit
Says who. Thats what businesses want you to do, that’s not necessarily what great craftsmen and dreamers and builders care about
TehCheator@reddit
Says the business—I said that’s what the job is, not that’s what the craft is. Ultimately, the business is the one paying for the work, so people who recognize that and build skills to match are going to have the most success over time.
PaleWhereas7716@reddit
you've cracked the code of internet minimalism
PositiveUse@reddit
The real rockstars are the technical competent with crazy good political and social skills.
Subaru_Sumeragi@reddit
Oh maybe you should look at the term Kakistocracy , it's a well known and studied phenomenom. It explained me a lot.
lolimouto_enjoyer@reddit
Yes, it's the same behavior that leads to the bullying of less socially competent people in school but in a more sophisticated manner.
Choperello@reddit
You can’t be both technically AND politically incompetent and survive at your job. You gotta be good at at least one of them. You’re witnessing survivor bias.
JuiceChance@reddit
Yes.
Refwah@reddit
People enjoy working with people that they find it pleasant to be around
You spend most of your waking time on this planet working
Educational_Fault24@reddit
Perfect
Few-Artichoke-7593@reddit
This isn't unique to Software Engineering. This is a problem everywhere.
zimejin@reddit
Totally agree, I’ve seen it myself.
ForeverIntoTheLight@reddit
There are multiple sides to this.
Some engineers are very technically astute, but have subpar personal skills. Such people may struggle to advance, despite having made genuinely great contributions. Despite having poured their heart and soul into the job. It is natural for them to feel aggrieved, on seeing people contributing far less, yet getting that elusive promotion.
But there are also people, who get into this industry, solely for the money. Once inside, they realize they hate this job. Their solution? Use every bit of political skill, every underhanded tactics to advance up the ladder to management, as quickly as possible. After years of doing this, whatever semblance of technical skills, they once possessed, has all withered away.
thedifferenceisnt@reddit
No this is not black and white all versions exist
eightbyeight@reddit
Yes
MangoTamer@reddit
Be careful with people like that because the reason they have survived in the industry for so long is because they maintain a stable of scapegoats for when a member of the herd needs to be culled.