> He makes it sound like a place where success means mastering office politics, not actually improving the product and growing the company.
This sounds like a pure and narrow-minded engineering-like only POV.
In reality, specially in big companies, you need a mix of both Politics and shipping great product.
If you believe people make rational decisions all the time, you will be surprised with the amount of feelings that goes into making them.
This post is great advice to anyone that wants to be a high performer anywhere in any field of work.
When I mentor juniors, we spend a lot of time on the topics of communication, coordination, working within the company's hierarchy, involving others, and so on.
Most mentees accept it, but a growing minority are preemptively cynical about these things, dismissing them as "office politics". Especially for junior engineers who get a lot of their information from angry comment sections on HN and Reddit, there's a growing desire to view engineering as the core of the company and expect all other departments to serve engineering. This results in a lot of pain when they're dropped into a real company where they have to work side by side with other departments to generate revenue.
If you want to be successful, it's important to accept that communication, relationships, and rapport are just as critical to getting anything done as the engineering work itself. It's not office politics, it's just the nature of working with other people. The longer people resist this idea, the more time they waste fighting reality instead of finding a way to make things work.
It really doesn't take much effort to build relationships and rapport within a company. You're going to have a long, painful uphill battle if you spend all of your time resenting and fighting it, though.
The poster doesn't mention this but there is an insistence at shopify from c level that there is no politics at shopify. But then this guy gets told by his gm that the key to the company is politics, which is definitely true there. Weird place.
This sounds like a pure and narrow-minded engineering-like only POV. In reality, specially in big companies, you need a mix of both Politics and shipping great product. If you believe people make rational decisions all the time, you will be surprised with the amount of feelings that goes into making them. This post is great advice to anyone that wants to be a high performer anywhere in any field of work.