If you’re familiar with Betteridge’s law of headlines you know that the answer is “no”. Every engineer recognizes politics for what it is: A process used by the unscrupulous to achieve ends that benefit no one but themselves and their cohorts. This is glaringly clear on the national level where politicians will do things against the public weal or even against their own interests simply to prevent their political enemies from benefiting.
Politics operates everywhere, of course, even within engineering departments. Over at Terrible Software, Matheus Lima has a post arguing that we, as engineers, should Stop Avoiding Politics. After all, he says, politics is just how people coordinate in groups and get things done.
Did you see the slight of hand? This is a redefinition of what most of us mean by “politics”. It’s used, mostly by politicians, to obscure what’s really going on. Regular people understand politics as the corrupt process I described above not as the everyday interaction between people that Lima describes as politics. Eschewing politics doesn’t mean refusing to interact with your colleagues or refusing to offer your opinions, it means not indulging in Machiavellian machinations to achieve your desired ends even if they’re arguable good.
If we did the things that Lima describes, we’d all be better off and things would move more smoothly but let’s not pretend that doing so makes us politicians. It just makes us something other than jerks.
I get the point that Lima is making. It’s important for us to engage and offer our best opinions about important issues but that doesn’t make us politicians or mean we’re practicing politics in the generally accepted sense of the word.