At the upper echelons of any sufficiently-large organization, the people present are increasingly there because of a combination of ambition and political savvy, rather than other competencies. However, that also means that selection pressures for other competencies are also lower — including, critically, the ones I value much more, like competence in the domain itself and excellence in the craft of software.

I say:

• “other competencies” because political savvy is a competency, and indeed a necessary one in any group larger than a few people.

• “increasingly” because this trend does not eliminate the importance of other competencies; rather, it shifts the balance between political and other competencies.

• “upper echelons” because this is not what we select for primarily in “rank-and-file” roles: junior engineers, for example, do get evaluated primarily on those first-order competencies and only very secondarily on political savvy.

• “sufficiently-large” because these dynamics do not (typically) emerge in a (healthy) group of five people, but seem always to emerge in (even healthy) groups of more than a few dozen people.