> In large companies people engage in politics because it becomes necessary to accomplish large things.

At a large company, your job after a certain level depends on your “impact” and “value delivered”. The challenge is getting 20 other teams to work on your priorities and not their priorities. They too need to play to win to keep their job or get that promotion.

For software engineering, “impact” or “value delivered” are pretty much always your job unless you work somewhere really dysfunctional that’s measuring lines of code or some other nonsense. But that does become a lot about politics after some level.

I would not say it’s about getting other people aligned with your priorities instead of theirs but rather finding ways such that your priorities are aligned. There’s always the “your boss says it needs to help me” sort of priority alignment but much better is to find shared priorities. e.g. “We both need X; let’s work together.” “You need Foo which you could more easily achieve by investing your efforts into my platform Bar.”

If you are a fresh grad, you can mostly just chug along with your tickets and churn out code. Your boss (if you have a good boss) will help you make sure the other people work with you.

When you are higher up, that is when you become said good boss, or that boss's boss, the dynamics of the grandfather comment kick in fully.

Agree. A fresh grad is still measured on “impact” but that impact is generally localized. e.g. Quality of individual code and design vs ability to wrangle others to work with you.

Impact is a handwavy way of saying “is your work good for the company”.