Seconded, especially your points 1 and 3; by failing through momentary carelessness to take account of point 3 during my first couple of months in my previous e

Seconded, especially your points 1 and 3; by failing through momentary carelessness to take account of point 3 during my first couple of months in my previous engagement, I inadvertently contravened point 1, and in so doing essentially talked myself out of a job, a situation from which mere exemplary success at points 2 and 4 failed to save me. Granted, it strongly suggests that the job wasn't really worthwhile that I was able to talk myself out of that job so quickly, especially as a result of presuming a technical question (from my political animal of a direct manager) to be honestly motivated and giving an honest answer thereto. That said, on the one hand, given time I could've inveigled my way across the org chart into a more stable and less politically dangerous position, and on the other hand, I could've saved myself a great deal of suffering had I simply not shot off my big mouth right at the start. Given that that error cost me an opportunity to redress, free of charge, my lack of tertiary education, I can only evaluate the matter as an overall failure on my part. On the other hand, I did manage to learn a great deal from it, both about office politics in general and about the peculiarly vile strain of same which infests academia, so at least I was able to salvage something from the wreckage. In any case, I can't overstate the value of the sort of political caution advocated here. It may be hard to believe if you, as I, first encounter office politics relatively late in your career, but all it takes is to shoot off your mouth just once, and piss off the wrong person in so doing, to completely destroy any future you might have had in an organization. And, sure, any organization in which that's possible is one where you might not want to work anyway. But you wouldn't be considering taking a position there if there weren't some benefit in it for you, and making the same mistake I did can very easily cost you your shot at whatever makes the job worthwhile.