Comment by draw_down

> How about you just do a good job evaluating your employees?

Sadly, bemoaning the capriciousness and unfairness inherent to workplace politics does nothing to diminish the presence of politics in the workplace.

The in-crowd gets the good work, the promotions, the clout, and the money. Everyone else gets to maintain the balls of mud that these people crank out as stepping stones on their way to the next position. Certainly a state of affairs which is appropriate to bemoan! And then when you're done bemoaning, you can either ride the train or get run over by it, your call.

You can say the fancy guys, the "10x engineers", the "thought leaders", the people posting on Twitter all the time aren't the real, true engineers, because they don't stick around to see their efforts through. And maybe you'd even be right about that in a lot of cases. But somehow that notion doesn't seem to bother those people very much...