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>>The worst parts of the job are related to internal politics This is such a frequent comment on HN that it makes me think I really ought to pursue coding as a
by sverige 10y ago
>>The worst parts of the job are related to internal politics
This is such a frequent comment on HN that it makes me think I really ought to pursue coding as a career to take me into retirement. I've always been very good at office politics and that skill has generally benefited me. Most people are really terrible at using office politics for their long-term benefit, and I have noticed that technical people tend to be especially bad at it.
In addition to having good knowledge and experience in a few other domains (insurance, finance, customer service), I've had management experience in all of them. <s> Maybe I could become a manager who makes great money by creating unreasonable, uninformed demands and impeding real progress. </s>
I completed a Udacity course in Python a few years ago but haven't had time to use it since then. It has seemed that maybe I missed the window because of age, but maybe I haven't.
- watwut 10y agoPolitics is the worst part of the job, not the only part of the job. The job has also good parts and boring parts and meh parts. With your experience, you might be fine business analyst on customers projects. Talking with customers, dealing with their politics and then turning all that into consistent set of requirements. That last part is something you would have to learn.
- sokoloff 10y agoI also think there's an inherent bias to complains about "internal politics" in a software job. For the most part, the people complaining about that have only ever worked in software jobs. If you mechanically translate "internal politics are a bad part of software jobs" to "internal politics are a bad part of all jobs with more than 2 people", it mostly goes away (IMO). It's possible that software engineers are slightly worse at or less tolerant of politics, but I don't see a particular excess of politics in software vs other fields. (We are a multi-discipline company, sales, marketing, manufacturing, R&D, software, call centers, supply chain, etc. All of them have more than 2 people and therefore all of them have some amount of politics.)
- watwut 10y agoI partly agree, but the lack of autonomy and no ability to do independent decisions/responsibility you have in agile teams (unless you constantly fight for it) makes politics much worst compare to the jobs where you have clear role/responsibility in the team. The again, it is still much better then middle management in big corporation or something similar.
- sverige 10y agoYes, middle management in big corporations often has very complex politics. I rather enjoy getting things done in spite of that, and manipulating the politics in favor of advancing an agenda that will benefit the organization. It wears me out, which is why I usually leave after about five years for a new playing field. (I have never had an interest in advancing to the executive level, where the politics are not at all to my taste.) >>With your experience, you might be fine business analyst on customers projects. Talking with customers, dealing with their politics and then turning all that into consistent set of requirements. That last part is something you would have to learn. This is a great suggestion, and I have had similar thoughts in the past. What would be the best way to go about learning how to create a consistent set of requirements? Actually work on a few software projects writing code, or something different?
- nickthemagicman 10y agoThe problem is not so much the politics imo, it's the 'amount' of politics. Its normal to spend 80% of your time schmoozing with coworkers and 20% of your time coding in my experience. It's a weird field.