from Hacker News

Unspoken Currency of Office Politics: Leverage and Sanction Between Coworkers

by physicsgraph on 5/17/25, 9:22 PM with 16 comments

• by foobarbecue on 5/18/25, 1:11 AM

  I avoid the word "sanction" whenever I can because it's an auto-antonym and just too confusing.

• by lurk2 on 5/18/25, 12:30 AM

  > This post features contributions from a coworker. Also with contributions from Gemini 2.5

  Smelled it from “What's one positive action you can commit to this week?”

• by crtified on 5/18/25, 1:01 AM

  Thinking back to a failed role, many years ago - the articles first 'sanctions' list reads like a checklist of achievements for the situation that I blindly dug myself into while under the high stress of the time.

  It took until quite a few years later to have a clearer perspective on it. Accordingly, with hindsight I wish I'd had the articles wisdom a couple of decades ago, as a preventative - though I partly wonder if I'd have had the brain structure to really take it in, back then.

• by jxjnskkzxxhx on 5/18/25, 2:56 AM

  Im skeptical that positive interaction between teams can exist, other than as positive interaction between their leads. It seems to me that risk/reward for an individual to blame things on a different team it too appealing to pass on.

  Or maybe this is how my company has trained me to think. Everything always seems to be a different team's fault

• by sdwr on 5/17/25, 11:00 PM

  Beautiful! People's zero points can be at very different places on these scales, and it takes a lot of effort to shift them.