Chapter 13. Politics
In Chapter 8, “Getting It Out the Door,” I discussed putting together a repeatable build process. Some software development managers read this, in an earlier incarnation of the chapter, and took me to task for not sufficiently condemning “politics” as one of the root causes of the difficulty. This revealed to me a misunderstanding about the role of politics, not just in software development but also in the management of technical organizations in general.
Why is politics such a touchy subject? Given that it exists, can you do anything about it?
Most software managers I know have had two diametrically opposed ways of dealing with it. One group takes the position that politics is poison and attempts to remove anything that ...
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