The difference is on whether the set of people you work with is mutable or immutable. If it's immutable, you better preserve relationships, because you'll be working with them in the future, regardless of what happens, and you need them to implement your plans. But if it's mutable, then when people dislike you, just find new people. Stake out a territory in idea-space, and then just adjust the set of folks you hang out with until everyone agrees with you.

Voice or exit. If you want voice, you've got to speak to what the people around you will hear. If you're willing to exit (or going to anyway), you can say what you want and swap the people out until you find the set who hears you.

Interestingly, the current U.S. presidential race is a perfect example of this. Trump is following the people-are-mutable, if-they-don't-like-you-fuck-'em strategy. He's burning bridges with everyone who criticizes him. And he's probably doing this because it has worked for him in business - when he stiffs a contractor, sexually harasses an employee, or loses an investor's money, there is always somebody else willing to get in line behind them. Clinton, however, is the consummate relationship builder. She's carefully worked across the aisle through decades of experience in Washington, such that she's got all the really important people supporting her. Trump's strategy works great at rallies, where he can speak only to the people who agree with him, but fails across the entire electorate, where he has to deal with a pre-existing composition that isn't going anywhere.

I absolutely agree with this. At the same time, you should attempt to downplay the fact that the current set of people you work with found you such a massive pain in the arse that they didn't want you to stay.

The guy's accomplishments look impressive. He should concentrate on those.

Right now I work in Germany, writing in C++, the language I have greatest expertise in (except maybe C, where my epertise is all in hobby projects).

My professional goal is to work in Australia, preferably in any langauge other than C++.

The vast majority of Trump voters are “traditional Republican” voters, at least in general elections. Many were folks who usually only turned out to vote in the general election, but not in the primary. In other words, they were expanding the pool of Republican primary voters, but not significantly expanding the pool of general election Republicans from “outise the party”.

As a tenured professor in a department looking exactly for this type of "Hacking Professor" I can tell you it may take a year to find talent. Positions in Europe might be even harder to fill. Advantage of our "biking distance from Amsterdam" culture is that anti-establishment mentality and non-conformist hear style of professors is acceptable. Quality research and teaching counts. We have an official CS class called "the Hacking Lab".

<shameless promotion> Any Associated or Assistant Professors out there with experimental background, please click: https://www.academictransfer.com/employer/TUD/vacancy/36681/...

Historians please weigh in: Is there any evidence that the Whigs also volunteered in their own destruction?

The Democrats themselves fell apart in 1860, splitting into Northern and Southern Democrats (running Douglas and Breckinridge, respectively). The split in the Democratic vote meant that Douglas (who was the second-highest popular vote getter) got the electoral votes of only one state, Missouri. This in turn meant that Abraham Lincoln, who wasn't even on the ballot in most Southern states, was able to carry the election, despite a popular vote count < 40% and net favorability ratings that were probably lower than Trump. This led directly to the Civil War.

Might sound corny but -there is no I in team -. Great leaders bring change by assembling great teams where everyone gets their time to shine and don't take the credit for it. Everyone wins.

While it is certainly distasteful when someone takes credit for something that they had no involvement in, I would argue that it's also possible to too far in the other direction. All too many programmers (myself included!) won't take credit for anything unless they did 100% of the work. Well, as I'm slowly learning, it is possible to be nuanced. It is possible to take partial credit and to understand that saying that you led an effort doesn't automatically mean that you did 100% of the work.

Part of being a leader is convincing other people to listen to you. A very good way of doing that is to be able to point to publicly recorded instances where you've taken leadership in the past and delivered good results. If you don't take credit as a leader, you'll very soon find yourself displaced (for better or worse) by someone who does.

Yes and no. Let's say your team has pulled off a major coup. As a (good) manager you very publicly say that all the credit belongs to the team. The team are happy and they love you. But the power players understand your real message.

But I have ZERO political skills, and I couldn't understand why.

Reading your comment is like finally getting the missing link. I never realized this was the basics of politics. I mean, I knew good politician did it, I saw them doing it among other things, but I could not comprehend it was the essence of it. No joking. Now I understand many things much better.

It may seems nothing to you, but you actually made my day.

And this is something that should be explained to more technical minded people, because otherwise, you can get very frustrated when you can't manage to influence things with good intentions in mind and a detrimental approach, while others seems to make it happen naturally.

Well, I guess now I have to practice a lot to get better at it. Seems a lot of work.

Being "political" in this sense is a codependent behavior.

Instead of operating out of fear of others' reactions, I prefer to give people the space they need to feel their anger, embarrassment, etc. by checking in with them over how they feel & empathizing with them.

I'll also agree with OP that approaching people 1-on-1 about big changes is much easier than putting someone on the spot to be open about & own their emotions in front of a group of people. The group's likely been trained to "act professional" by hiding their emotions as opposed to being professional by producing quality work. Sadly, that's not the sort of culture typically found in a business.

The last engineer I worked with taught me a similar lesson after one of our last meetings: "You lost the moment you became emotional. Don't ever let people see your feelings in a meeting like that."

He was right about one thing: a group of "professionals" hates emotions. Go find a group of emotionally mature adults to work with & work on your own emotional maturity. Here are some hints for how to work on yourself that also acts as a list of mindsets to spot in others:

- nobody makes you feel anything - you have a choice how to respond emotionally to all thing, though the amount of time your brain gives you to spot the choice may be unnoticeably small - that spot can grow with practice (mindfulness meditation) - whatever you're feeling in the moment is ok...you're allowed to feel it - unpleasant feelings signal a fundamental human need going unmet...find the need & address/accommodate it - everyone's doing the best they can and always have been...if someone isn't doing the best they can, the real culprit is you not accepting someone - own your feelings...don't defend them, especially by blaming them on other people. - apply all of this to every single person, including the worst of people. - read "Nonviolent Communication" https://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Lif...

Being political it's so much work that most people, in high places, in big organizations, barely do anything else.

Time for disruption. Dear hackers: Find a way how one can automate at least large parts of this by a computer program. :-)

The guy in the video suggests companies collect users' reasons for using products/services & feelings around those reasons. Companies would then be able to choose which reasons to design for.

The thinking goes like this: Right now, companies use metrics based on how much things cost in terms of time/money/attention. Those are abstractions on top of our reasons, so if companies can create a system to directly measure our reasons, those more meaningful metrics will allow them to produce better products.

That idea doesn't get rid of the politics in companies...unless you remove the company from the equation when collecting user reasons.

My idea is to build a public blockchain-based system for collecting those reasons publicly & anonymously. If every company has a public user-generated set of reasons for using their product & whether or not the product is a good choice for fulfilling those reasons, the internal debate changes to which reasons should they choose to fulfill. Arguing over whether this or that change better fulfills this or that reason would be silly because testing the idea is the only thing that makes sense.

There'll still be politics around funding tests, among other things, because political people aren't just going to change how they act overnight, but I'm betting this system will give them far less to play with.

You have to be willing to do a lot of walking away, but the inevitable "you were right" has been satisfying so far.

Or I guess another way to say it is if you can, do, and if you can't, by all means, coddle. Just hope I don't end up across the table from you.

Besides, this assumes people rejecting your idea are bad, while they are just being humans. Humans are weak unefficient creatures, it's no use to take offense in it, we all are weaks in some areas.

But it is correct to take offense about people in position who command about things they are weak in.

Choosing to get offended is rarely a quick path to healthy productivity.

This is the kind of thing you learn by hard knocks or by a really caring mentor.

It's easily the most important book I've ever read.

Also, ensure that whatever you do makes your "superiors" look better, but make goddamned sure that it reflects their cleverness in choosing YOU for the job. If you're in academia and you write 99% of a grant that gets funded, put it on your CV. If you write a contract or a proposal that makes the company $5m, put it on your resume. Don't ever expect anyone to give you credit -- take it, and then thank whoever would logically be obligated to give it for their gracious acknowledgement. People seldom do what they know to be right -- they do what is convenient, then repent. So make it convenient for people to do the right thing for you.

Make it easy for people to appreciate your value and hard to fault your shortcomings. It goes a long, long way. If you can't do that, maybe look for a position where it will be easier for you to execute this task.

Good luck! You will be a happier person if you do this.

also note that if you (need to) push an idea, you shouldn't be the only one pushing it. You should prevent the idea becoming tied to you as person.

Some people will just disapprove the idea because of the fact that it comes from you (instead of judging it by its merits).

The fact and reality that you are absolutely correct is a HUGE PART of the ENTIRE REASON why software startups so frequently outperform large incumbent companies with greater resources, support, investment, and time. Because while the software startup is messily, irritatingly, often horribly dealing with its people issues, it creates pods of productivity, small, coherent groups that work well together and make things happen without the need to wait until the lunch next Tuesday to gauge incumbent X's support for proposition Y before presenting proposition Y at gathering Z five weeks from now. In a successful startup, someone screams, "EUREKA!" summons one or two other minds from the team to a rickety little conference room, elaborates the idea to make sure he/she isn't missing anything obvious, and then starts working on it, possibly being finished by the end of a two-week sprint. What takes the incumbent organization MONTHS of political angling happens in these small, fluid organizations in WEEKS - or less!

I'm really quite glad your analysis is correct, because it creates massive opportunities for guys like me, who trend a bit on the abrasive side now and then, but it also discourages me as to the correct course of action to get any already-existibg institution into fighting shape. Is it potentially literally impossible under average circumstances? I worry it genuinely might be, and that creation of new institutionsay be the only answer, but that answer makes me very sad for some reason.

I suspect no one structure is optimal for all contexts.

Have a look at the design of the new Crick Institute in London, designed for serendipity. Or Facebook's attempt at an open plan office (probably not a great example, but you see the idea). Maybe even Taleb's ideas about anti-fragility (despite my finding him a terrible, turgid author).

I would rather assume "no one structure is optimal for all people".

He set out to improve things, which is a good goal. Improving means criticizing the status quo at some level. In case of academia, with tenured people lingering there for life, status quo is probably the result of their work (for better or for worse). Wanting to "improve" that was probably perceived as an insult something like "what you did before sucks, I'll make it better". Unless he was dealing with unusually rational colleagues, that stuff is never forgotten and surfaces at voting times.

But also playing devil's advocate here. It could also be that this is a "well the grapes are too sour anyway" type story. That is, maybe his research wasn't seen as very good, innovative or interesting to deserve a tenure. Maybe he knew it too so set out to instead focus on teaching and other aspects. I've seen people do that. Can't code so they become really strong proponents of documenting everything, or they look for other busy work to justify their salary. That is not necessarily all bad or wrong, but it is interesting to consider here. We haven't really heard from other side so to speak.

It is good this blog post got written. Can't imagine it would reflect well on the department overall in the future.

My suggestion to them is to start their own business or find one to work for (with a willing owner) that needs its core rocked or is full of straight-talkers.

We shouldn't typecast ourselves for a paycheck of it leads to misery.

When you switch to the arts and sports we LOVE to see extreme outliers and go to great lengths to assemble and prop them up. It's visceral excitement to see 320lb freaks of nature face off on a line of scrimmage in an NFL game. It would be cruel to have them face off against a highschool team or even just mix them in on the same line. Yet that kind of disparity happens all the time in other types of human assembly.

So I look at this from the other side. He did his deed at the University, made a mark, and got rejected for having high impact good, neutral, or bad. Some people were uncomfortable with high performance for reasons which could range from pettiness to valid criticism.

What you would call lack of tact I might call integrity. I am sure he will land somewhere else and do great things. Industry is more fluid and amenable to assembling high performance, especially in startups.

I did CS a rather strange way via military college so that's not the best sample, but when I took a programming languages class over the summer at Arizona State they had 300 students (yes really) in the lecture hall trying to learn C, C++, Scheme, and Prolog for the Sophomore/Junior level course. It was a total shit show, and if that had been my path to earning a degree and becoming a programmer I'd have hightailed it out of college. It's also an obvious head drop for diversity in the field. I've heard similar horror stories from colleagues from non-top tier CS schools. I'm inclined to believe he found and addressed problems, and had demonstrable success.

Never ask a question of decision maker type people when you don't know the answer already.

We tend to decry "politics" as a dirty thing, and I'm no great fan of dysfunctional organizations. But even among bright, innovative people, I've observed what I think is the root cause of your rule:

Most people, especially managers, really don't like to debate and negotiate in front of an audience.

I'm like that myself. I think (could be wishful thinking of course) that I'm a high performer. But I'm a terrible debater. I'm not quick with facts, and I don't handle the emotional pressure of debate very well. I'd probably flunk a coding interview. I prefer to sit down and think something through, and to access the information that might not have been presented by the debaters. And in any event, I've noticed that most conclusions reached through debate in meetings are simply overturned by facts later on.

I recommend trying this exercise with real people with the caveats that a) some of them will become angry, and b) probably most of them will ignore the outcomes unless you have some way of incentivising them not to.

A change requires orientation, energy, and whatever RoI. This guy - as he describes himself subjectively - is all about engaging his own energy. Orientation is essential and is expected to come from managers (dynamics). Managers also choose a strategy that improves the RoI (kinetics). Engagement is nevertheless absolutely essential to make change happen IRL (work). That's a pity an agreement couldn't be found with his managers. It seems there's kinda misunderstanding going on here, that should have been managed appropriately.

There's no corporate equivalent to "Tenure" whereby a company says "We guarantee you a position for life" (Fellow roles excluded).

And just to be clear, I'm well aware of claims (right or wrong) that teaching doesn't matter, but this is different from student evaluations of teaching.

The tenure vote he describes reminds me of the Blanket Party scene in Full Metal Jacket (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCNqKrX1sx8), and I think it is the same lesson: conform or suffer the consequences.

I am not saying that it is incorrect; but in the background of demands by multiple people inside a university, his actions - as described by him - do not seem to be so significant.

Paul Graham, Why Nerds are Unpopular: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

> Rocking the boat publicly (as this post clearly shows he is OK with) is not the mark of good political skills.

You're not wrong.

However shouldn't we be asking ourselves why we are requiring such skills?

The truth is that being a good politician has an inverse relationship with being a geek.

Peter Thiel has been pointing this out for many years. He asks, do we really have scientists anymore? Or are they really bureaucrats and politicians pretending to be scientists?

I am convinced it is the latter. I think we have whole universities filled with cargo cult science.

This relates neatly with some awkward facts about the modern education system.

For all the extraordinary efforts and feats of intellectual prowess it is also extraordinary how little they practically achieve. The number of breakthroughs has dramatically declined. Once you get past the PR bullshit and backslapping there is very little actually happening in many places in the 'innovation economy'.

Take nanotech. I am not aware of any advances that make their appearance in a consumer's home. I can think only of a handful of niche applications like expensive hydrophobic coatings. If the advances were occurring in the factories we should be seeing more refined low cost goods on a massive scale. Is that actually happening? I don't know that it is. We've been promised a lot and been waiting for long time.

Take biotech. Nothing. Just nothing. I think the last biotechnology I interacted with was a yogurt. Can anybody name a single biotech invention or innovation that actually exists in people's houses? In the 50s and 60s we had the Green Revolution, that counts. However the price of food has been rising considerably for several years now. There is certainly no food product that I consume that has become much cheaper.

The discovery of DNA is at least half a century ago. Despite much fanfare about CRISPR, why should we be sure that this time biologists are bringing home the bacon? Is anybody willing to bet that in ten years time there will be GM cool pets, much cheaper food, much cheaper quality wood for building from GM trees? I would not take that bet.

What about energy? Willing to bet your energy bills get much lower in the future?

tldr; Maybe a whole lot of people are totally full of shit. The basic metric of progress is that things get cheaper, but they're not, so it isn't happening. If you're not willing to bet that prices decrease then maybe your confidence in the future of invention/innovation is misplaced.

Again, I'm not saying anything about his talent, because it's impossible to know without hearing all sides, which I seriously doubt will happen. I'm saying that the article, his opinions, his actions, and from what his version of events are, is sending signals that he cannot get along with his superiors / peers in a way that is mutually constructive and beneficial.

Honestly, industry might be better for him, if he can find a benefactor willing to finance his research. But academia is petty and political, and from what I'm reading, his odds don't look good.

Yes, he should recalibrate his ideas of why he wanted to work in academia.

Today if you want to get ahead you need a patron and some people who know enough to bounce ideas off them.

I think it increasingly the case that universities are the worst place to send a real intellectual. Some of the most useless people in the world are respected here.

I've been to one, I'll say what I think. I think most university people are posers. Completely unfit. Institutionalized.

Then they are requested to perform. And they cannot. They like are those plants specialized to perform only in a certain Alpine microclimate.

Result: psychological sickness and poor pay. Employers don't know what to do with these people. And society insists on manufacturing more of them. It's a sick system, and it is best to get out while you're still honest.