Playing politics is how senior engineers protect their team

When I write about doing politically valuable work in big tech companies, I often get comments accusing me of trying to get ahead at the expense of my colleagues. In fact, the reverse is true. If you’re a senior engineer or above, it is your responsibility to effectively navigate tech company politics. You owe it to the more junior members of your team.

The reason is neatly expressed by this quote I saw in David Patterson’s great career advice article:

There are no losers on a winning team, and no winners on a losing team.

The first part isn’t entirely true in tech companies - you can have a bad reputation on a successful team - but the second part is true. You can’t have a good reputation on a failing team. Because of that, if you don’t “play the game”, you’re undercutting everyone on your team. In particular, you’re undercutting the more junior engineers, which is especially nasty for three reasons.

First, they aren’t in a position to ship as easily (due to lack of experience or just not having the title). If you’re not worried about shipping things the company cares about, your team might not ship anything at all.

Second, they need accomplishments more than you do, because junior positions are up-or-out: you can’t sit in them forever like you can a senior role. It is much, much easier for them to get promoted if they’re attached to high-profile projects, which you ought to be seeking out and running.

Third, it’s harder for junior engineers to find a new job if your entire team gets laid off or sidelined. If your team isn’t shipping anything the company cares about, the chances of everyone getting laid off or transferred to a backwater area is much higher. This might not bother you, but it will hurt the more junior members of your team’s careers in a really lasting way.

A big part of your responsibility as a senior+ engineer in a large tech company is lifting up your junior colleagues: helping them grow¹, and more importantly making their work visible to the organization so they can be rewarded for it. You cannot effectively make their work visible if you are not respected by your management chain. When you tell managers that a particular piece of work was difficult or impressive, they will believe you in proportion to your own credibility. This is my favorite part of the job, hands down, and it really irritates me to see senior engineers opting out of it while believing they’re on the moral high ground.

I think it’s well understood that having a weak manager - a manager without political clout - is really bad news if you’re a junior engineer looking to grow at the company². What’s less well understood is that a weaker version of this effect also applies about senior+ engineers. If you’re a senior+ engineer on a team with more junior engineers, your refusal to engage with company politics will meaningfully reduce their chances of promotion.

I get it - it feels cynical to spend your time on your executive team’s latest initiative, or to prioritize projects over JIRA tickets, or to avoid glue work unless it’s directly helping you deliver. But it’s actually far more cynical to treat all corporate goals as bullshit and set yourself up as the pure engineer who’s the only one who cares about the users. It’s the worst kind of cynicism, too: not just harmful to yourself, but harmful to the junior engineers who you ought to be helping.