[MarkMarine]

One of my favorite quotes: “ Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” - Milton Friedman

I’ve found writing 1 pagers and technical documents that I can circulate, and then re-reference when there is a crisis is the way to have my ideas floating around at the time. I’ve had some success driving the architecture I want iteratively, slowly progressing towards my goals by building consensus but I’ve also been owned by VPs and directors that are much better at politics than I am. Having the library of 1 pagers, sending them around so they are latently in the air, and waiting for the impetus to execute on that idea has been much more successful.

[Aurornis]

> but I’ve also been owned by VPs and directors that are much better at politics than I am.

One surprising thing I learned when I became a mid/upper manager: It's very easy to spot lower level employees playing politics.

Part of it is because most ICs or even 1st level EMs are overconfident in their ability to play politics. They commonly overestimate their own level of social/political intelligence relative to their managers.

The other part is that they just don't have as much insight and communication within the company. They think they're persuading or manipulating (depending on intentions) a certain stakeholder to form some alliance to push an agenda, but 5 minutes after that conversation that stakeholder sends a message back to their manager giving them a subtle heads up about the politicking going on. I can't count how many times we, as management, watched clumsy office politicking attempts play out while doing our best to gently keep them contained without bursting someone's bubble and making them angry.

[MarkMarine]

I’m dumb about it. I don’t have a scheme, I don’t have a hidden agenda, I don’t have ulterior motives… I’ve got what I think is great engineering (divorced from what the customer or business wants in the short term) and I just diligently try to make that happen. I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve always got the long term health of the system (and fairness to the workers next to me ) in mind. I say the same thing to everyone, I’m open and honest, and I get wrecked every time I try to execute any strategy that doesn’t accidentally align with something a VP wants.

Ya’ll are so much better at this it’s scary. I can’t really read when I’m being lied to in the moment, I usually naively believe that support I’m getting is because my ideas are good, or that management has the same view of the collective good that I do.

I spent a while in the marines as an enlisted man, lower NCO. There is no politics and people next to you have to trust each other with their lives. I never really made the turn to what the world is outside of that, I’ve always struggled with it.

I learned not to try. Ya’ll can do politics. I’ll write one pagers and wait for my chances to make things better.

[kaffekaka]

Working with naive people is such a relief. They never surprise you with some f-ed up shenanigans just to make themselves look good, and they are worth their weight in gold. I try to be naive myself as well. But reality is political in the end.

I do the politics I think are necessary, but otherwise stay in my bubbles of naive, trusting and kind people I have stumbled upon.

[YZF]

I like the quote and I think this can work. The problem is the timescales can drive you crazy. The other problem is sometimes crisis is ignored, i.e. there is a crisis but it's not acknowledged or is somehow otherwise normalized.

[j_san]

What does it mean to make your 1 pagers and technical documents "float around" in your case?

[dehugger]

Send them to coworkers. I've had success with the same strategy. There are three important parts required to make this work though: 1) Have a reputation solid enough that people are willing to take the time to read what you send them. 2) Read the room and write ideas/proposals on topics that are of interest and are relevant to the organization. 3) Find an audience that can provide meaningful support (basically, people with clout)

[elevatortrim]

Do you mean if 1-pagers helped you get recognition and advance your career, or if they helped your ideas come to life?

[MarkMarine]

They helped my ideas be “lying around” and picked from when the crisis happened.

In the source, the author says that when there is a crisis (an outage or similar) management will come to you and ask for help solving the problem and you should already have a solution ready to go. What I’ve found is that you should pre-seed your solutions with 1 pagers. Identify things that need to be improved, changes to solve tomorrow’s problems and just take the extra step of writing a 1 pager about it and circulate it. Then when the problem happens that your solution fixes, your fix is already there ready to be fully fleshed out.

[anon84873628]

Absolutely! I thought this was inherent in the Staff Engineer position in the first place, so was sort of surprised it needed to be stated in the article.

[MarkMarine]

I didn’t get a manual, just sharing what works for me so the next (new) staff and principals have one more data point.