[zwaps]

There is a career book that makes a lot of good but extreme points.

One of them is: technical ability is actively detrimental to your power and career. You have to spend time and energy on actually doing things, and every competent manager will do their best to keep you right where you are, with as little political influence as possible.

Conversely, as a manager, so the book says, you want to avoid actually doing anything. You should start initiatives -as many as you can- and deftly use your political capital to either own, disown, or weaponize them. Whether they succeed in creating value is irrelevant, certainly not something you should focus on.

People focused on success and value of initiatives are still working hard when you have moved on. These people are hopelessly behind the scheming manager, eating crumbs.

And if necessary, you the manager just claim credit retroactively.

[marcinzm]

I slightly disagree. Managers aiming to move up the political chain are very much happy to give political influence to those that will publicly and privately support the manager's own political goals. They want to be pushed up from below and pulled up from above. Managers that are coasting won't because they don't want competition from below.

Engineers often can't tell the two apart, and have too much ego to not publicly and privately make their manager look bad.