Politics is a when a company like Caterpillar spends a year trying to acquire GPU's for their autonomous vehicle teams, because they have 20 security and project managers that want to assert themselves in every conversation to get promoted, to get to senior leadership positions, while the company looses out to Chinese competitors they were ahead of.

Politics is also when middle managers and 2 engineers conspire to steal a coworkers work to get promoted and move up the silicon valley startup ladder, so that the company has to come back a year later to bring back the original engineer, because none of these people were capable.

If you haven't seen politics you might have been either blessed or didn't want to see it, but for every 1 company I worked with that was efficient I worked with 4 that were not.

Good examples! :)

Politics happens whenever there are more than 2 people :). OP above must be really lucky to have not seen politics at all or one of those beneficiaries of politics who are like "Politics ... wut? nah"

Politics is what happens when you have limited resources and you need to decide where to allocate them. Politics are everywhere humans are.

Yes to this. Too many people complain about politics as if it is some “outside” force and not simply implicit in the way that human beings organize diversified interests. Since each of us can only embody our own world view, politics is inevitable.

I understand that what people typically mean is people who are “too political” where the pushing for interests stops being in service of some goal and starts to become its own point. But in trying to avoid the appearance of that, too many people fail to engage in any politics and in doing so actually cause more harm than good to what is important to them by missing the important point that it’s incumbent to speak up for things you need and believe in because people who allocate resources may have insufficient knowledge or insufficient time to dedicate to knowing your work that intimately.

Politics would be less of a shit show if people had intro textbook level knowledge about political science and/or didn’t approach it like a sport.

> I understand that what people typically mean is people who are “too political” where the pushing for interests stops being in service of some goal and starts to become its own point.

It typically doesn’t stop being in service of some goal, but rather becomes entirely self-serving.

That’s the good side of politics, and I agree: it is everywhere humans are trying to accomplish things together.

But when I say gravitate away from hard work towards playing politics it refers to something else of course. Getting others to do your work while still claiming credit is one example.

It’s not the good side of politics, it’s how it’s defined in textbooks.

I don’t think those textbooks attempt to define the concept in this context. Like it or not, “corporate politics” is a well established term.

Consider whether the stuff you’re thinking about is “politics” or merely “stupidity” or “malice” (or some combination of these). I see no need to mix up the words.

This is the grown-up answer that this thread is clearly lacking

But why then is it used as a pejorative? What you described is "engineering".

That's not at all what engineering is. Engineering is the application of science (including mathematics) to solve technical problems and/or optimize processes.

An engineer also has to eat lunch in order to function, but engineering is not the same thing as professional food critiquing.

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To answer your question, it's pejorative because politics is about allocating resources one way or another, towards and away from particular social groups. It's inherently going to be making some of the people unhappy, 100% of the time. Real life politics also tends to not be done smartly and honestly at all times and in all places, and this can make some people upset as well.

Most people associate all of that together, and most people don't take an academic (or particularly analytical) approach to the subject.

It's possible you've never worked with politically minded people but I doubt it. It can be as small as an engineer broadcasting how hard a problem is before solving it. If they do that, they get the kudos for doing it. If they don't, it just gets done unnoticed.

Most people who dislike political people are failing to place the blame on the right actor. Sounds like this engineer has recognized how to get rewarded at their job and has adjusted their behavior to fit. The actual root problem is that this reward system fails to recognize the quiet everyday progress required to make something great.

In other words, in areas of limited resources where politics are innate, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

You’ve worked for 35 years and you’ve never seen anyone act out of self-interest to the detriment of the project / company? Either you’re incredibly lucky or you’re blind. ;)

I'll take Blind for $1000 Alex. The self-interested people I saw were weeded out unless they made decisions that led to stock increase. In which case their self-interest was aligned with the correct decision. I don't call either one politics.

I think of politics as useless bickering that doesn't advance the project. Usually it is self-correcting for the reason above. I've seen a lot of bad decisions drive company's stock into the shitter, but I think of that as simply the "wrong" decision.

Shit, I think I -AM- blind. Hmm....

Politics in this type of context is fighting to the death over a single pie versus working together to bake a second pie. Some of this is necessary but when you only do this a company will not grow except through luck.

I'll give you one from personal experience, and it was in an academic setting.

My boss, whom I will call Boss W (who spent a lot of time maneuvering people around) had first worked for my previous boss, Boss F. Boss W, I think, spent more time playing chess than anything else. First he worked out a situation where he was peer to Boss F, then, with another coup, managed to get Boss F working for him.. Still not satisfied, he managed to change to whom the department reported to from Uberboss J to Uberboss C.

Uberboss C, who was peer to another administrative type, Administrator W, was eager to prove the value to the change. And so I was tasked with developing a product rather similar to something that Administrator W had at his previous job. The product itself was politics, in that it presented to a group of stakeholders about a thousand to three thousand items to decide the disposition of. But this was futile, really, because we had about six hundred thousand items to have reviewed, so we would never actually get anywhere with presenting this to the stakeholders. But they wanted it and so ...

And so I was told that this was going to be an Agile thing, and I had until the start of the semester to have it done, and they needed to see a fully-featured prototype (a contradiction) right away. Although promised, I never got to meet with the internal stakeholders who would present this product to the external stakeholders who would do the disposition.

That's quite a tight deadline, but it gets interrupted because to prove value to someone else, I get sent on a week-long conference doing something utterly unrelated. They just wanted to prove to the guy running Dept B that they were going to have someone in the mix for his technology.

Despite this and catching a tremendous cold, I managed to have something developed by the start of the semester, because it was so very very urgent.

And then it was not shown to the internal stakeholders for seven months. All o that hustle! So Agile much wow.