managementHow to get promoted? How to get a salary raise? How to stop writing code and start managing other losers who still write it? How to become a team leader, a boss, a Vice President, a CTO, and a CEO? Is it a matter of luck, or can some tactics help you get to the top of the career ladder? Let me share a few lessons I’ve learned.
Many books have been written about office power games, for example Jeffrey Pfeffer’s Power in Organizations (1981), Henry Mintzberg’s Power In and Around Organizations (1983), and Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s Men and Women of the Corporation (1977). They are good reads, but barely useful as practical guidelines. They treat career-successful people as humans. They are not, they are rats.
Joep Schrijvers’s The Way of the Rat (2004), my favorite, uses exactly this metaphor. Being a rat means taking advantage of other people and enjoying it.
This is what a rat does in nature: it doesn’t earn its food, it steals it. That’s why we people hate rats—they steal from us. However, rats feel nothing bad about being rats. That’s how they were born. They are made to be thieves, with a big smile on their ugly faces.
First and foremost, office rats are politicians. All they do is fight with other rats for better position, higher rank, and bigger resources. To win they don’t write cleaner code, and they don’t make more precise budget forecasts either. To win they make other rats lose.
Being an office rat may be hard for most of us. I present you with a list of skills that may help if you’re ready to stop being a human. Not soft skills, not hard skills, but rat’s skills. Here they are:
How to Talk a Lot Saying Nothing All rats do in the office is talking. If you keep your mouth shut and your eyes open, as many office coaches recommend, you either look obviously weird and get rejected, or eventually start talking, disclosing everything you’ve been holding to yourself for long. In a rat office, silence is never safe. Instead, you should talk a lot, at every meeting, using every opportunity to open your mouth. But you should say nothing. This is easy: no matter what the subject is, find an angle that is obvious and argue in favor of it. Say, we discuss who gets the salary raise: Jeff or Mary. Your argument should be: “Not raising a salary for a good employee is bad!” This idea doesn’t add anything to the argument, but it helps you defend yourself against other rats. They won’t think of you as their enemy and won’t bite. Your point is an obvious boring truth—the best type of argument.
How to Find Scapegoats Some people stay in the company because they produce products: code, tests, design, architecture, etc. Rats don’t do that, because they don’t want to and they don’t know how to. Instead, they stay in the company because it’s hard to kick them out. They know how to look formally innocent. Moreover, they know how to make themselves look valuable. They know how to directly attribute themselves to the results achieved by those coders and designers. When things go south, rats know how to find scapegoats—people that can be formally blamed for the failures. You should learn this skill too, it’s not so difficult. Just pay attention to every mistake people around you make and link them with your own possible failures. Say, your friend came late to the office on Wednesday last week. Good! Schedule a fake meeting on this very morning and when the time comes, claim that because of his absence you weren’t able to share important information with him. Build such evidence systematically and you’ll have a strong weapon against your friend, who is obviously your enemy at the same time.
How to Read Between the Lines In a professional full-of-rats office environment everybody wishes to screw everybody. The only way to get a friend into trouble is by finding how his actions violated the rules. Talking and writing is the only act a rat does. A rat knows that enemies are watching him, that’s why he doesn’t say or write anything straight. A rat writes “The report is great!” and means “I don’t trust you anymore, better quit this job.” The “great” is the tell, if he usually writes “perfect.” You must know how to read between the lines and understand what people truly mean.
How to Invent Obstacles Regular people, who are not rats, try to be helpful to others and be modest about it. This is what rats use against them: modesty is your weakness. Instead, you should radiate the smell of sweat. Every task should be difficult for you, but not because of your incompetence. Because of so many obstacles you have to deal with. Regular people say “I will deal with it, trust me.” A rat says “I will try, but it’s very difficult, because of …” Later, when you screw it up, you will blame the obstacles. If you don’t, you will be a hero who fought the obstacles. Those quiet humble losers who just do their job will always be behind you.
How to Identify Owners Only in a small startup of five people everything is owned by the founder, who is one of these five. In a large organization, resources—money, staff, hardware, offices—belong to people who decide how to distribute them. To achieve your goals in the organization, you need resources. You need their owners to give them to you. They won’t do it voluntarily, no matter how noble your objectives are. They don’t care. You can get resources only if you trade: you give them something in exchange. The scenario is easy, when you need them, since you know what you can give them in exchange. It’s more complex when someone comes to you asking for the resources you own. If you don’t know what this guy owns, you don’t know what to trade. A good rat is always prepared to ask for a favor when being asked for a favor. A good rat never gives anything to anyone for free. Learn what your friends possess or have access to—be prepared to ask them to share.
How to Be a Friend Rats are politicians, not engineers or managers. A good politician knows how to do one thing and nothing else: make friends. It’s easy to make a friend when you have nothing to share. However, imagine a lead of another department comes to you and asks you to give your best engineer to his project. What would a regular team lead do? He would fight for the engineer, to keep him in the project. What would a politician do? He would do everything to keep the other manager a friend. He would not care about the engineer or the project at all. Friendship, for a rat, comes first. Productivity, efficiency, profit, customers—all of that is secondary. Enemies ruin your career, not bad code, broken servers, or lost customers. Know how to make friends at all costs.
How to Disrespect Yourself Rats don’t produce anything valuable, neither engineering nor management. They do politics only: make friends and then betray them. A long time ago, when they were engineers, they did something productive, but it was a long time ago. They’ve forgotten all that already. All they do all day is attending meetings with other rats, also highly incompetent. If you have any talents somehow related to engineering or management, you will hate yourself for being a rat. Sitting in those meetings you will be bored to death. More importantly, you will constantly ask yourself a question: “Why do I have to be here? Am I as useless as these morons?” You must be ready to answer yourself: “Yes, I’m one of them, my talents are useless, I’m nothing more than a talking head. It’s over.” This answer will make you stronger. You will be a good rat.
How to Respect Fools The higher you are on the organizational ladder, the less competent people are around you. I mean technical competence. A CEO of PepsiCo can become a CEO of Apple, you know this story. The same happens everywhere: clowns are climbing up management ladders. They get promoted for being great politicians, not for knowing how computers work. Your job is to keep your mouth shut and never tell them they are fools. However, the better expert you are, the more difficult it will be. Learn how to stop asking yourself a question: “Why do I have to spend time with fools?” Also, this question may hurt: “Why does our company tolerate fools being in charge of smart people?” God forbid you ask these questions out loud in the office. This would be the end of your career.
How to Be a Fool Since the better expert you are, the more you despise the fools around you, your office life would be easier if you stopped being an expert. Don’t code, don’t read technical books, don’t touch anything related to product engineering. Instead, spend most of your time with other rats, picking the most incompetent ones. You can easily find them—they are constantly surrounded by other smaller-caliber rats. All they do is talking, organizing meetings, attending meetings, and spreading rumors. They are wasting time, you may think. This would be your first instinct while you are only becoming a rat still having some technical expertise inside you. In a few years you will realize that you are an absolute disgrace, a highly incompetent imposter, with an overblown salary. This is when you put all of your energy into the fight with other rats—the survival instinct will kick in. This is when you become a great rat: a CEO, a President, an icon for others.
If you don’t want to be a big boss and an icon, it’s your call, stay human.
However, if you don’t want to be a rat, but still want to be a big boss, bad news for you: you will be food for other rats, just a step in their career ladders. They will set you up and present your mistakes as their advantages.
Being a rat is a full-time job, without vacations or day-offs. You can’t be a bit of a rat and a bit of a software engineer. Trying to stay in the middle only makes you a weak rat: perfect material for other rats to use. Spending time on writing code, analyzing server architecture, or sitting with a UI designer to make your product better only takes you away from rat’s job: making friends and betraying them.
Make a choice. The earlier in life, the better.
