I’d beware conflating “interpersonal skills” with “playing politics.” For CEO at least (and probably CTO as well), there are other important factors in job performance than raw engineering talent. The subtext of your comment is that the companies you mention were somehow duped into promoting these bad engineers to executive roles, but they might have just decided that their CEO/CTO needed to be good at managing or recruiting or negotiating, and the star engineer team lead didn’t have those skills.
Second, I think that the “playing politics” part is true at some organizations but not at others. Perhaps this is an instance of All Debates are Bravery Debates.
My model is something like: having passable interpersonal/communication skills is pretty much a no-brainer, but beyond that there are firms where it just doesn’t make that much of a difference, because they’re sufficiently good at figuring out who actually deserves credit for what that they can select harder for engineering ability than for politics. However, there are other organizations where this is definitely not the case.
I’d beware conflating “interpersonal skills” with “playing politics.”
Certainly there is a spectrum there.
The subtext of your comment is that the companies you mention were somehow duped into promoting these bad engineers to executive roles
I did not mean it that way in general, but in one particular case both ran the company into the ground, one by picking a wrong (dying) market, the other by picking a poor acquisition target (the code base hiding behind a flashy facade sucked). I am not claiming that if the company promoted someone else they would have done a better job.
Second, I think that the “playing politics” part is true at some organizations but not at others.
If we define “playing politics as “using interpersonal relationships to one’s own advantage and others’ detriment”, then I am yet to see a company with more than a dozen employees where this wasn’t commonplace.
If we define “interpersonal skills” as “the art of presenting oneself in the best possible light”, then some people are naturally more skilled at it than others and techies rarely top the list.
As for trusting the management to accurately figure out who actually deserves credit, I am not as optimistic. Dilbert workplaces are contagious and so very common. I’m glad that you managed to avoid getting stuck in one.
Yes, definitely agree that politicians can dupe people into hiring them. Just wanted to raise the point that it’s very workplace-dependent. The takeaway is probably “investigate your own corporate environment and figure out whether doing your job well is actually rewarded, because it may not be”.
Dilbert workplaces are contagious and so very common.
I have a working hypothesis that it is, to a large degree, a function of size. Pretty much all huge companies are Dilbertian, very few tiny one are. It’s more complicated than just that because in large companies people often manage to create small semi-isolated islands or enclaves with culture different from the surroundings, but I think the general rule that the concentration of PHBs is correlated with the company size holds.
I worked mostly for small companies, and Dilbert resonates with me strongly.
It probably depends on power differences and communication taboos, which in turn correlate with the company size. In a large company, having a power structure is almost unaviodable; but you can also have a dictator making stupid decisions in a small company.
I’d beware conflating “interpersonal skills” with “playing politics.” For CEO at least (and probably CTO as well), there are other important factors in job performance than raw engineering talent. The subtext of your comment is that the companies you mention were somehow duped into promoting these bad engineers to executive roles, but they might have just decided that their CEO/CTO needed to be good at managing or recruiting or negotiating, and the star engineer team lead didn’t have those skills.
Second, I think that the “playing politics” part is true at some organizations but not at others. Perhaps this is an instance of All Debates are Bravery Debates.
My model is something like: having passable interpersonal/communication skills is pretty much a no-brainer, but beyond that there are firms where it just doesn’t make that much of a difference, because they’re sufficiently good at figuring out who actually deserves credit for what that they can select harder for engineering ability than for politics. However, there are other organizations where this is definitely not the case.
Certainly there is a spectrum there.
I did not mean it that way in general, but in one particular case both ran the company into the ground, one by picking a wrong (dying) market, the other by picking a poor acquisition target (the code base hiding behind a flashy facade sucked). I am not claiming that if the company promoted someone else they would have done a better job.
If we define “playing politics as “using interpersonal relationships to one’s own advantage and others’ detriment”, then I am yet to see a company with more than a dozen employees where this wasn’t commonplace.
If we define “interpersonal skills” as “the art of presenting oneself in the best possible light”, then some people are naturally more skilled at it than others and techies rarely top the list.
As for trusting the management to accurately figure out who actually deserves credit, I am not as optimistic. Dilbert workplaces are contagious and so very common. I’m glad that you managed to avoid getting stuck in one.
Yes, definitely agree that politicians can dupe people into hiring them. Just wanted to raise the point that it’s very workplace-dependent. The takeaway is probably “investigate your own corporate environment and figure out whether doing your job well is actually rewarded, because it may not be”.
I have a working hypothesis that it is, to a large degree, a function of size. Pretty much all huge companies are Dilbertian, very few tiny one are. It’s more complicated than just that because in large companies people often manage to create small semi-isolated islands or enclaves with culture different from the surroundings, but I think the general rule that the concentration of PHBs is correlated with the company size holds.
I worked mostly for small companies, and Dilbert resonates with me strongly.
It probably depends on power differences and communication taboos, which in turn correlate with the company size. In a large company, having a power structure is almost unaviodable; but you can also have a dictator making stupid decisions in a small company.