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Agree, many workers having to spend a large portion of their time politicking is highly inefficient. Someone has to put their head down and do the actual work a
by kyllo 12y ago
Agree, many workers having to spend a large portion of their time politicking is highly inefficient. Someone has to put their head down and do the actual work at some point.
But at the same time I think understanding politics and power, and having a little political skill, is important for everyone because it's how you convince others to help you get things done. People who see office politics as an inscrutable evil just get frustrated when they can't convince anyone to listen to their opinions. And they're easier to exploit and manipulate.
Knowing how the political game works is the best way to protect yourself from those who would play it against you. And if you're too busy doing actual work to play the game, then you need a good PM who you really trust to play it on your behalf.
- javierluraschi 12y agoWho "exploits and manipulates" developers? If the answer is their dev manager/lead, good, that's their "job" (being sarcastic here); but yeah, I expect from my boss to give me some direction when needed. However, I think you are pointing out that devs get "exploited and manipulated" by, surprise, other PMs. I really can't think of someone else that is good at this. So yeah, just remove PMs that are specialized in "politics". Now, if you remove "politics" PMs then you could argue that customer support, cross-team requests, etc. will impact developers. In this case, dev managers/leads should prioritize those requests and it should be painful to take away dev time to serve other tasks. If it's painful you will probably invest time in fixing the customer support issue rather than managing your customers. If you are spending too much time serving marketing requests, maybe you just have a bad product that needs improvements before it gets shipped, etc. I really don't believe easing politics is the way to go.