[dnautics]

I'm in a position where I succeed by not playing politics. Since i'm not playing politics (which others in the company are doing), i am spending my time doing development work. I am now building a team, and my only concern is to deliver results on time. My CEO thinks I'm competent and has expressed interest in helping fund me a startup, when the time comes. I'm not going to say that I didn't strategize the a politics "meta game" (picking a place to work where I would be visible, choosing to work on projects where I can have an impact) but the amount of time or effort I am spending on it is vanishingly small.

In any case my point about science is that playing politics is MORE important than delivering quality results. In my lab as a grad student, there was a grad student who delivered extremely sketchy data and then won the grad student of the year award and now he's a tenured professor at a top 50 US research institute.