The Politics of Software

Like Soylent Green, the difficulty of people working together is people. It's PEEE-PUHLLL!

Hootie and the Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View, is the best selling debut album in the US of all time. Yet at the height of their radio popularity, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who admitted to owning it because it seemed too kitsch — too much pop about holding hands and crying at the Miami Dolphins. And yet it holds the record, even now, of the most US sales for any debut album… more than Appetite for Destruction, more than Whitney Houston, more than Boston.

Office politics is exactly like Hootie and the Blowfish. You’ll never meet someone who says they like office politics or that they’re good at it. Yet everyone laments the existence of office politics in many workplaces.

You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.
— Gov. Gavin Newsom

Here’s the key: you aren’t stuck in office politics, you are politics. Specifically, people claim “office politics” whenever something doesn’t go their way due to interpersonal relationships instead of explicit, objective systems of decision-making or rewards.

Whenever people are involved, it’s inevitable that relationships begin to matter. You can build or join a positive culture of interpersonal relationships or a negative one. But you won’t find workplaces without politics because, like Soylent Green, it’s people.

Explicit Objectivity vs. Implicit Subjectivity

I’ve seen far more people tear up when playing Monopoly than Chutes and Ladders (née Snakes and Ladders in England). And by far the game I’ve seen the most crying or near fisticuffs is Risk.

The reason is simple. Chutes and Ladders has prescribed rules from which you can’t deviate. Whereas with Monopoly, the official rules allow for negotiation (e.g. “I’ll waive your rent this round if you waive mine the next time I land on your Boardwalk”). Risk, above all, is rife with negotiated alliances and backstabbing betrayals. In a way, Risk is all about the negotiations. In fact, it’s arguably a game you can’t win if you refuse to form, and occasionally break, alliances.

Workplaces and companies operate similarly. Some roles or teams have explicitly objective rules. For instance, many sales teams run via commissions which are paid on a pre-communicated scale applied equally to everyone. Testers at Microsoft used to be rated primarily on the number of bugs they filed, minus penalties for duplicates/etc. Metrics can of course always be gamed and abused — but at their best, they articulate a standard of performance for which rewards are given. You can always debate whether a metric has been gamed, but they at least set a baseline for initiating discussion.

Whereas ideas like holocracies or Valve’s famous self-organizing teams have implicit subjectivity built into the very fabric of the rules of the game. When people don’t explicitly report to anyone and governance is loosely defined, if at all, the only thing left is politics. Former Valve employees attest as much.

You must state the rules of the game and the metrics by which it will be judged as much as possible. This is why most maturing startups eventually establish a performance review system. It’s why most companies have explicit hierarchies. It’s hard to set the rules correctly, but it must at least be attempted to spare everyone a real-life Hunger Games.

Resource and Opportunity Contention

Office politics happen far less when there aren’t highly-visible resources being contended. For most of my years at Facebook, engineers did not have publicly visible titles. Similarly, for my time at OpenAI, every engineer was a “Member of Technical Staff.” This takes one whole avenue of angst and competition off the table. How many times have you worked at a company where employees get disgruntled when someone joins with an undeserved title? The simple act of publishing titles creates a marketplace for competition which otherwise wouldn’t exist. Imagine what would happen if you published salaries.

Early Facebook was also relatively free of office politics partly because it was so obvious to everyone that we’d all succeed or fail together, and that if Facebook succeeded, everyone, even people fresh out of college, would make a windfall. When resource contention is low, people fight over less.

Whereas Microsoft limits the percentage of employees who can be Partner level (L68+ / E8+). When I worked there, the limit was something like 1.5%. When you establish this sort of scarcity explicitly, you create a marketplace for competition by making collaboration zero-sum. Just as in Risk, people form alliances. People backstab. People curry favor by kissing up. People claim credit for others’ work. You’ve lit a fire in a theater with only one door which we’re not both getting through.

Manu Cornet’s famous depiction of life inside Microsoft

Abundance — of growth opportunities, of monetary remunerations — covers over a host of ills. This, if anything, is a great reason to run or join a company which is on a huge tear towards success.

Leaders’ Decision-Making Influence

Some leaders naturally build organizations with a lot of politics, while others don’t. You likely already have an intuitive sense of which leadership behaviors engender the most political behavior.

Leaders promote or exacerbate office politics when they:

• Are heavily influenced by presentation or communication skills (i.e. form over substance)

• Entertain interpersonal gripes about other employees in one-on-ones

• Bend official decision-making criteria when individuals negotiate exceptions

• Obviously favor employees who are chummy with them

• Allow employees to pursue goals unaligned from each other, or delays enforcing goal alignment

• Ask for return favors

• Fail to visibly punish or disfavor political behavior

If you lead a team where people complain about politics, consider whether you might inadvertently be allowing or encouraging those problems to fester.

Turtles All the Way Up

As you get more senior in an organization, you’ll encounter increasingly more politics. There are a few reasons for this:

• Bigger decisions have consequences which are harder to causally attribute accurately. Did your team succeed because of you or despite you? The larger your team, the harder this is to answer. This subjectivity makes evaluating the performance of a senior leader difficult, and thus more susceptible to politics.

• Senior positions are limited. As you progress, the types of roles considered a step up will decrease in number. This narrowing of opportunities increases competition amongst people. More often than not, the more senior you are, the more super-capable your peers. As the difference between two individuals becomes harder to resolve at those ultra-high performance levels, decisions about who to promote into a position are more susceptible to subjectivity.

• The biggest problems tend to be people problems. The higher up you go, the more key leadership challenges tend to be people issues. Thus people who are better at working with and persuading others end up surviving or thriving.

So it’ll inevitably be the case that as you progress in your career, you’ll likely encounter more politics. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: it means you’re becoming more influential, and the types of problems you’re solving have squishy solutions.

Know Thyself

I’ll leave you with one potentially spicy take: people who complain the most about office politics are usually the most faithful practitioners thereof.

If you’ve ever had a coworker who whispered all the time to you in hushed tones about how this or that employee engages a bunch in office politics, that coworker themselves is likely one of the most political people.

Fireside True Story™ Time: A fellow Microsoft employee (“Nilesh”) once reached out to me to say he was “very impressed [I] had deviously espoused a decision that ended up preserving the headcount in Vancouver.” He truly seemed enamored. Here’s the thing: at no time did I try to do or say anything with the goal of somehow sparing Vancouver’s employees. Nilesh, no doubt someone who himself has a bunch of angles interacting with others, misinterpreted my behaviors because he himself would have acted thus.

And if you find yourself often despondent because all the offices you’ve worked in have been highly political, is it possible that you are actually the one who’s political? That you are incepting the very politics you complain of?

I’m hardly saying this has to be the case; you may indeed have chosen a series of teams which all have been very political, with you yourself the hapless innocent beleaguered by nefarious coworkers. But this possibility is at least worth considering if you find yourself beset by politics all the time.

Handling the Politics

I’m bad at office politics, so am the last to give advice on how best to handle it. However, this is something I’d like to learn from a reader. If you’re up for making a guest post about handling office politics, please reach out to me with a draft by end of August which I’ll publish if it seems fitting for Molochinations’s audience.