[November_Echo]

> Later my boss told me not to do that again because it caused havoc with schedules and such.

Did you talk to anyone about your plans before you brought in the demo or let them know they were solved problems? Often these sorts of reactions come down to your boss not wanting their team to lose their jobs because of the perception that it can all be handled by one person who's happy to work weekends.

[kstrauser]

I wasn’t politically savvy enough to do that. Honestly, I don’t want to be. The reality was that the project really could have been done in a month by a couple of people. It got turned into an enterprise project with multiple unaligned teams with Gantt charts and milestones and everything.

Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, for a Django CRUD app. It was a 4 person-week project turned into a major ordeal. No one should have lost their job; they should have been put to work doing the thousand other more productive things they could’ve been doing instead.

[selcuka]

> No one should have lost their job; they should have been put to work doing the thousand other more productive things

I think that's exactly why you should have talked to your peers and let them know they were solved problems, unless the overengineering was intentional.

[ruszki]

And it’s possible that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

I got a green light to do an integration in a week alone, which was planned for a team of 5 for half a year. We knew that it cannot be that much. So I delivered…

It was never used. It was purely political. The integration didn’t happen because it was “half a year”, but because middle management didn’t like the idea of integration for political reasons.

[fourside]

> I wasn’t politically savvy enough to do that.

Over the years I’ve come to realize that what people call politics at times is just having interpersonal skills.

[keyle]

I've been in a similar situation, with a laravel product quoted for over a million and I quoted 40K and did it all.

That did not go down well, even though it was a great product, styled etc. had all the bells and whistles.

[nosianu]

> Honestly, I don’t want to be.

I don't get it.

On the other hand, programmers are happy to work with AI, which is incredibly limited and a pale shadow compared to the real "I" in educated and experienced meat brains.

Also, networking - in both space and time (among the living, the latter with the dead, one way from them to us) - is THE gigantic advantage of humans. Not to want to bother with it is an equally gigantic mistake, if you want to use being human to more than a tiny fraction of its potential.

If you are interested in creating solutions and useful systems, "politics", human networking, should be THE number one priority. Long before anything technical.

Important scientists and engineers were great networkers and communicators. They also knew which connections where worth making. Just like in the brain, fewer good connections are better than wildly cross-connecting everything.

[jackblemming]

You’re doing God’s work. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Keep building.

[yieldcrv]

I'm not good at office politics, but I got better at not caring. Understanding what is erroneous stimuli, as an employee you don't have to respond especially if you aren't noticed. This is fairly easy for engineers, even lead engineers. Anywhere there is a buffer between you and other stakeholders.

Occasionally though, I do get thrust into it, mostly during a company pivot about something I wasn't hired to do. All the personalities to manage, I 100% fumble, but still deliver.

[scrubs]

Omg! Who the hell cares if the "boss" got a heads up. When I'm in engineering or you're in engineering with me, we party the same way: better is better.

The bosses - hell management's job leading into organizational culture - is to stop politics from derailing good engineering and customer satisfaction.

It's not too tough for me. Now that you know where I stand the other side better get it's act together.

Drowning in politics helps nobody including the boss. It's a net loser.

Now I'm practical and empathetic: a surprise can bring heat. But then you breath and get a grip. Cool. But thereafter the right things better get done. Politics for a day - np - politics sapping know how making cynical SE'S think twice? Never.

[kstrauser]

I learned a lot from that job, mostly how not to lead people. Subsequent jobs that I’ve been at for longer stints have placed much more emphasis on delivering good work than on building complicated plans to someday hopefully maybe consider delivering good work.

[juleiie]

replace your boss

[kstrauser]

That’s what I did here, by going to a new place that wasn’t fundamentally broken.