I’ve been contemplating writing about this topic for a few days now and it was somewhat fortuitous that I came across this piece from The GeekWithA.45.  It brings home an important lesson, which the idealistic often learn the hard way.

Political forces and processes exist, whether you want them to or not, whether you consent to them or not, and whether you participate in them or not.

They can harm you, and are ignored entirely at your own peril.

A common failing among technical people is that they see politics as dirty and beneath them.  They wear their nonpolitical status as a badge of honor.  To them, engaging in politics would mean compromising their principles.  They also can’t see the point of being polite to all those stupid nontechnical people.  They desperately want to live by a code that rewards being right and having the best abilities and where everything is “fair.”

Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work like that.  There are political elements to everything that happens in the business world.  Ignoring that fact will eventually cause a technical person to run into a brick wall.  Usually head first. 

It also doesn’t help that amongst geeks technical discussions are carried out with little regard for social niceties.  Solutions are arrived at through a process that seems rude, mean, and nasty to an outside observer.  Non-technical people don’t understand how people can go into a room, demean each other’s ideas, and then emerge without anyone having been killed.  Unfortunately, when a geek gets exercised about something he tends to forget that non-geeks don’t appreciate this form of discourse. 

So you end up with the worst of all possible combinations:  someone who sees it as a virtue that he doesn’t play politics and who regards social niceties as a sell-out of his values.  And I almost forgot to mention a dogged determination to be right, regardless of the consequences.

I know all these things because I’ve seen it time and time again.  Worse, I’ve been that way myself, before I wised up.  I was luckier than he was in that it didn’t cost me a job to learn the lessons of how to get along.

I know a lot of people deride most of the self-help courses, but I have to credit being sent to the Seven Habits course with helping me change.  The most important thing I learned was that I was in control of my reactions.  I think it had reached a point where people would come into my office and bring up my “button pushing” topics just to see me take off (kind of like a wind-up toy).

I learned that taking control of my reactions, remaining calm, and listening to what the other person was saying before responding (and not just waiting to get in a rejoinder) allowed me to get further than bullheadedly charging forward and demanding that the other person yield because I was right.  It also showed me that the person who responds calmly and with reason will be taken more seriously than the guy who is ranting.  Saying, “I’m not certain that the approach you’ve outlined is the best one for the problem,” will get people to listen to you better than saying , “That’s a stupid idea and it won’t work.” 

It all seems pretty damn obvious now, but it takes a while for the idealistic geek to come around to these social niceties.  Unfortunately, I’m watching someone I know run himself into this meatgrinder.  It’s a vicious cycle.  He gets upset with some code he sees as inefficient or inelegant and proclaims loudly to all who will listen that the code is a piece of crap.  When he’s denied the chance to make wholesale changes (management wouldn’t fund the testing costs for these kinds of changes to an app with half-a-million lines of code) he gets frustrated and gets more angry.  As he gets more angry he gets louder and less polite, which means they’re even less likely to listen to him.  That, in turn, gets him more frustrated.  Repeat ad nauseam.

All it would have taken to head off this impasse would have been a bit of political understanding.  All he did was couch his desire for changes in terms of how he felt about the code, not in terms that the management understood.  They don’t really give a damn if he’s happy with it.  They just see an application that is working in production.  Understanding the needs and wants of management would have allowed him to rephrase his request in a way that demonstrated the benefit to them of these changes.  While he may have viewed this as a sell-out, I view it as a way of creating a win-win situation (Seven Habits again).  The management gets something they want and he gets to do something he wants.

Of course, it’s probably impossible to set up a win-win situation with a malicious person, like the one GeekWithA.45 encountered.  That’s where your awareness of politics plays its part as a distant early warning system.  It’s no fun to have to play the defensive in this sort of situation, but it’s better than being blindsided and swept aside altogether. 

I hate politics, but rather than butt heads with it, I’ve learned that it’s a necessary evil and how to at least work around it.  It doesn’t matter whether you play the game or not, the game will play you if you’re not at least aware of it.