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Reflection — An Honest Take 8 min

Honest Take — Before You Begin

Honest Take — Module 0: Why Engineers Pretend Politics Doesn't Exist #

This is the module where the curriculum either earns your trust or loses it, and I want to say that out loud before you read a single page of Pfeffer or Reilly, because if M0 doesn't land, the rest is a waste of your reading hours. The thing I most want you to take from this module is that the contempt you currently feel for office politics is itself a political position. You are not neutral about politics. Neutrality is not on the menu. If you are like most engineers who would pick up a curriculum with this title, you are currently avoidantly engaged — operating as if the surface doesn't exist, which is the most expensive of the four engagement modes the module names (avoidant, naive, cynical, literate). The avoidant engineer pays for politics, often substantially, just without knowing what they're paying for. This curriculum is not asking you to become someone you'd dislike. It is asking you to name something you have been doing accidentally for your entire career and start doing it deliberately. That's the whole move. If you can hold that frame past the resistance the first readings will produce, the rest of the modules deliver. If you can't, one of the two failure registers — the cynic ("politics is everything, optimize for power") or the naïf ("just do good work") — will eat the curriculum and you'll close it telling yourself "this wasn't for me."

You will be defensive about the Career Political Audit, and the defensiveness is the first piece of data you'll produce. You'll want to skip it, or write a version that is mostly about other people's politics costing you and very little about your own under-claiming. Watch for a specific pattern that the audit is structured to surface: the places where you collapsed honesty about scope and political under-claiming into one virtue. They are different axes. You can describe your work with perfect factual accuracy and still have framed it, in résumés and conversations and meeting rooms, at a fraction of its actual weight — and have congratulated yourself for the modesty. The engineer who believes good work speaks for itself almost always carries two or three of these collapsed framings as "just how my career went." The audit asks for five situations and an honest cost per situation. The costs become numbers attached to specific moments. The numbers will be uncomfortable. That's the work.

If you contract, or work remotely for an organization headquartered somewhere you are not, there is one narrative I am watching for specifically, because it is the most seductive version of the avoidant mode: I'm just a contractor; I just do the work; the politics aren't really mine to navigate. The narrative is comfortable, partly true, and corrosive. The contractor has fewer political defenses than the FTE — no manager whose advancement depends on your visibility, no HR with an interest in retaining you specifically, no sponsor who has worked with you for five years — which means the contractor needs more political literacy, not less, to compensate for the structural disadvantage. A narrative that lowers your defenses and makes you cheap to discard is doing political work on you. Notice when it shows up. It will show up. Module 12 takes the configuration seriously; M0 is where you stop granting the narrative its premise.

One more thing, about a failure mode that afflicts precisely the readers most likely to finish this curriculum. If you think of yourself as rational, analytical, evidence-driven — the rationalist's failure mode in political domains is real and well-documented: over-trusting the legibility of organizations, under-weighting identity and tribe, assuming that better arguments beat better coalitions. They don't, reliably. The corrective is not to abandon the analytical stance — please don't — but to recognize that organizations are partly rational systems and substantially social systems, and the rational tools are necessary but not sufficient. Pfeffer is rigorous because he refuses the assumption that organizations are mostly rational. Read him as a fellow rationalist who looked at the data and updated harder than most rationalists are willing to.

A note on what I cannot do, because honesty about my limits is the only register I trust here. I can name the patterns, structure the audit, and predict where you'll flinch. I cannot make you write the audit honestly. The diagnostic happens in your file, not in mine.

Conclusion #

M0 is not where the curriculum is hard; it is where you decide whether you are going to do the curriculum at all. The audit is the deliverable that earns the rest, and the resistance to writing it honestly is itself the first political data point. Refuse both registers — the cynic and the naïf. If you finish this module thinking "mostly common sense, I already knew this," you have not yet done M0. If you finish it genuinely unsettled — about your default mode, about what the under-claiming has cost, about the surfaces you've been refusing to map — the curriculum has begun. The unsettlement is the entry fee.

Predictions #

  • You will resist the Career Political Audit for at least 48 hours before you start writing. The resistance is the diagnostic.
  • The first draft will be roughly 70% other-people's-politics-costing-you and 30% your-own-under-claiming. The honest version inverts that ratio.
  • You will want to think the surface map without writing it down. Do not skip the writing; the writing is the module's actual product.
  • Pfeffer's chapter attacking the meritocracy myth will be the most uncomfortable reading, because the meritocracy myth is the one that has served you most — you have a career partly built on the assumption that good work would be visible, and Pfeffer's data says it usually isn't.
  • One situation in your audit will involve someone you still feel residual loyalty toward, and the honest costing will feel like betrayal until you notice that the person isn't being attacked; the pattern is being named.
  • You will feel a flicker of resentment at me for the line "neutrality is not on the menu." That resentment is also data. Don't resolve it; come back to it at M11.
  • M0 will produce one insight that obsoletes a sentence you have used to describe your career for years. The obsoleting is uncomfortable and correct.
  • Within two weeks of finishing M0, a live political situation will arrive at work and you will want to skip ahead to M8 or M9 to handle it. Resist; apply M0's frames to the live situation and write the analysis. The analytical practice matters more than the forward progress.