Observation: People who are not good at their job are more likely to indulge in office politics

Tell us how and when you realised that you need to move away from the people around you for your betterment. There's a saying, "You're the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with." This unknowingly shaped us for periods.

Lately it's been really hard trying to cope up with derogatory comments and people trying to pull you down. I build/refactored some of our codebase and things go south in terms of performance at few places. I realised the mistake and fixed the performance bottlenecks that happened because of me in least time possible. But people still look down on me on and manager keeps passing hurtful comments about the incident every now and then. Moreover there's worse happening fellow people start blaming you for the performance of code you haven't even touched. You are just utilizing some function in your codebase written by some other person. I don't know how to handle all this and what should I do to avoid this? Mistakes happen, bugs go on prod, things can break but as far as once everything stabilise, we should move on.

Here’s my story in the field of software engineering: There’s this colleague of mine who is on a pure tech role but hardly codes. The person spends his entire time on LinkedIn sharing new age tech stuff and projects himself to the world as if he is the Messiah of architecture. The guy preaches the same gyan to members of my team. For the last one year, this guy, in the capacity of Software Architect has not pushed a single line of code into our application source code and this is on record. Yet, he is highly regarded as an expert in technology. The guy has killed the careers of some genuine software engineers with his unique approach to make it look like he is taking a lead to own stuff in tech space. The guy has had tremendous career growth, got promoted 3 times in the last 5 years. In my view, the guy is a tech junkie whose knowledge carries no value. Yet he managed to butter the leadership team to reach to position that he is currently in. Did you encounter any such people? If yes, comment your story.

I always heard about the office politics but never faced. But in my current company, I got caught up with the petty dirty office politics. Manager keeps his ass safe by not taking any actions. He’s also one of them though. People take complete advantage of his inaction and lick his boot to safeguard themselves. Behaviour takes u-turn when the manager is not around. Mediocre behaviour and no intent to do better. One of the worst experience of my life. Have to get out.

I've recently come across this phrase several times on this app. And people also mean different things when they say this phrase. Someone meant product requirement discussions and meetings. Someone else meant dynamics among team members in a team I wanted to understand what people mean when they say this. Especially in the context of saying a company is bad to join because of 'office politics'. Looking for a switch so wanted to get this clarified

I don't understand people who have been with one organisation for 10, 15, 20 years. I can't even think beyond 3 years and that's a stretch too.

How does one pick a good boss to work under as working under a good boss is most important decision for ones career? What are some visible red flags one should be wary of?

If frequent job switch does matter then how frequent? Every 6 months is frequent or every 1 year is frequent? What other criteria do you also see?