[GNUgler]

I disagree. I work at Google, and I can't imagine getting in trouble for making an unambiguous improvement to someone's code.

There is, of course, some politics. It's just not at the level where people could openly be pissed off just because someone made them look bad by doing better. Politics happens over much more ambiguous things, like what length people from one team should go to to fix bugs affecting another team. These are areas where there are legitimate differences of opinion, so it's only natural that people's biases affect their work.