I never like the word “politics.” It carries the association of a bunch of people just playing backstabbing games to further themselves.

While this does occur, in general what I see is that with any large-enough group of people, there will be strong differences of opinions on how to steer the project to success.

In fact, I don’t think I can remember a single “political battle” that didn’t stem from a legitimate concern in how some project was being run and what they had decided to focus on.

Like it or not, politics is pretty much your day to day life at vp+ level at these companies.

But we can all pretend to live in idealism la la land where everything is operating on someone’s best intention.