Chapter 5 The art of organizational manipulation

Most software engineers work in dysfunctional corporate bureaucracies and need to employ certain manipulative techniques to get things done effectively.... We call it organizational manipulation.

As companies grow, they develop bureaucracy and processes in an effort to manage profit, reduce risk, increase predictability, and support the massive weight of the organization itself.

You need to underpromise and overdeliver whenever possible.

As an engineer, try to focus your energies on launching products over just about everything else.

As tempting as it might be to spend a ton of time cleaning up your code base and refactoring things, we've learned from experience that if you dedicate more than half of your time to this kind of defensive work, it's hardly valued at all and you'll find yourself in the somewhat embarrassing position of having nothing (politically) important to show for your time. This is not only a good way to get no recognition, but it's also a good way to get your product canceled.

"Perception is nine-tenths of the law"

We now have a handy rule we live  by: a team should never spend more than one-third to one-half of its time and energy on defensive work, no matter how much technical debt there is. Any more time spent is a recipe for political suicide.

Friends come and go...enemies accumulate.

If you can't change the system, there's no point in continuing to put energy into changing it. Instead, put energy into leaving it.

If you don't put the effort into understanding how to navigate your organization, you're leaving a huge part of your destiny to chance.