Post hits the nail on the head. Even the best engineering solutions that closely align to organizational goals will be torpedoed by people at the end of the day, often to preserve their own political power rather than improve the organization or their own working lives.

This is why I laugh when I hear someone say tech is a meritocracy. It is if you consider manipulation, exploitation, subterfuge, sabotage, and backstabbing to be of merit; otherwise, there is no meritocracy out here in the real world, not so long as any given individual of power can destroy your career or livelihood over hurt feelings.

As much as I’d love everything to be a technical problem to solve, that’s just not reality at the moment. We gotta listen to people beyond our silos and find a way to get them to our side in things if we want to progress forward on something. I’m doing that right now in a company stuck firmly in the 1990s, and it sucks.