[wwweston]

When you say “political“, what do you mean? It’s easy for me to relate to talk of software development aesthetics or philosophy and I’ve certainly had plenty of conversations that I think are accurately described that way. But I can’t think of software development discussions that I’d describe as political (except in the sense that politics is what happens when people disagree on anything).

[fn-mote]

Depends on your organization I suppose.

Some places you see people pushing their Shiny New Rewrite, basically as resume fodder or promo packet material.

I describe that kind of decision as political because it doesn’t seem to come with a legitimate cost-benefit analysis.

[wwweston]

That makes sense — decisions that are about personal benefits beyond technical/product choices and their merits.

[psychoslave]

Might be like, do we build more datacenters whose masters and possessors are all in the oligarch club, or do we build distributed systems that maximize flat power distribution.