The Politics of Your Job: Building Trust + Subverting DevOps Hierarchies (Respectfully) with Joshua Zimmerman

Ben Ford [0:00] Hello again everybody, and welcome to today's episode of Pulling the Strings podcast, as always, powered by Puppet. My name is Ben Ford. I'm our developer relations director here at Puppet, and I'm pretty active in the community as binford2k. We may have run into each other here and there in Slack or maybe at a conference or something, and that's kind of what we're here for today. Being in community, you won't be surprised to know that understanding how people engage with each other and how people work together is really, really high priority to me. And so I was at DevOpsDays Chicago and I saw a conference that looked kind of interesting. Title was something like Organizational Politics, and I was like, "Wow, this sounds intriguing. I want to know what this is going to be about." And this is how I met Josh Zimmerman. I was two minutes into the presentation and I was like, "I need to have Josh on the podcast." So Josh, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and maybe why you're in the space that you are or anything?

Josh Zimmerman [1:14] Yeah. So as Ben said, my name is Josh Zimmerman. I've been in the greater DevOps community for well over a decade. I initially got involved with DevOps because I had been at a Ruby conference and I was trying to explain what I did to someone, and they were like, "Oh, that sounds like DevOps." And then of course you go to your first DevOpsDays and you're like, "Oh!" So it turns out that saying that I'm in DevOps is kind of like saying, "I'm in Agile." Doesn't quite work out. So I got involved with DevOps community stuff, started going to a lot of conferences. I, for a long time, was running the Madison DevOps meetup in Madison, Wisconsin, and even ran DevOpsDays Madison for a couple years as well. We're hoping to bring both of those back at some point, but pandemic …

Ben Ford [2:04] Oh, yeah. We're all struggling with that same thing. I have my fingers in several pots here trying to get some DevOpsDays up and running again, so here's the best of luck to all of us, right?

Josh Zimmerman [2:15] Yep.

Ben Ford [2:16] Cool. So after listening to this episode, I was like, "I really, really hope that this helps you sort of figure out how decisions are made where you work, sort of figure out how you can influence those and how you can work with your peers and your coworkers to get more things done, to improve the processes that you work for and gain leverage, if you will, to make better decisions." So maybe we'll start out real quick with: how do you define politics in the tech world and DevOps? That was kind of an interesting phrase. It both intrigued me and maybe sort of pushed a couple buttons, and I was like, "Oh, this is going to be rough." But why do you use the word “politics"?

Josh Zimmerman [2:59] Yeah. So in general, when you speak about politics, like if you're studying political science, what you're actually studying is how we do collective decision-making. Politics at its core isn't what we think of as elections and who's the leader and that kind of stuff. Politics is how we make decisions, and we've created a number of methods and ways that we can do that, such as what we have as a representative democracy where we elect our leaders and they have authority. And so when it comes to work, when it comes to our organizations that we run, when we talk about politics, it's how we make a decision as an organization or as a team. And so not using the word "politics" is just feeling uncomfortable because you don't want to be considered to be playing politics, but it's what we're doing.

Ben Ford [3:51] Yeah. So the things that we think of as politics, the elections and all, what you're saying is that's really just the machinations of what's actually happening underneath.

Josh Zimmerman [4:02] Right. As a team, you all mobbing on a problem, on a ticket, to get it done and making decisions around that, or having a committee meet to say, "How do we want to do this thing across all of our engineering?" That's politics. And so one of the key things to me is, hey, everybody doesn't want to be playing politics, but you're already playing politics when you say, "Hey, I don't want to be bothered by this other team. I want to go heads down." That's politics, too.

Ben Ford [4:35] And even just branch protection, or saying that you need two approvals to merge a PR or something, those are already ways of doing politics, of making decisions.

Josh Zimmerman [4:45] Right. Those are very political decisions. That you need two people to sign off that your code is okay to go, that's political. It's not necessarily the wrong thing to do by any stretch, but it is political. You're saying another team can't merge into your branch, as you said. All of those kinds of decisions are very political, because it changes who can do what and how we do things. And so yeah, when I phrased this how I did, the initial version of this was actually in 100 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know, a book by O'Reilly that was compiled by Emily Freeman and Nathen Harvey. And I pitched this to Emily, because I know her, and she was like, "Politics?" And I was like, "I'm talking about organizational politics, not actual politics." It's one of those things where people key into that word in a very negative meaning, but it's not inherently negative, right?

Ben Ford [5:45] Right, right, right. And maybe that's why people sort of overlook this idea, but why do you think that there's a negative connotation to this idea that there's, I don't know, science behind decision-making?

Josh Zimmerman [5:59] Partially because people are kind of jerks. Nobody is going to go out and say, "I want you to do what I don't want to do." So when we approach politics in an organization or even as a country, we want all of the decisions to be made in the way that we want them to be made. We're not approaching this often as, "Let's have this other person who disagrees with me make the decision." And so there's a lot of negative feeling around how decisions get made in general, because often the decisions that are being made aren't the ones that we want to have made.

Ben Ford [6:40] Something that's kind of fascinating to me is I feel like people get myopic and forget the bigger picture, the organizational goal that we're all trying to work towards, and they forget about the fact that I have certain ways of getting to that goal while you may have different other incentives and whatnot, and I feel like people don't remember that we're all trying to do the same thing, and they get caught up on petty infighting or whatnot. Maybe that's part of the reason why we have these negative connotations for the words and the ideas.

Josh Zimmerman [7:14] Yeah. A good example is if a company or an engineering department has one headcount that they can add ... "We did okay last year. We're going to add one headcount. Which team does this go to?" Every team out there is going to tell you that they're understaffed ... and they probably are ... to do all the things that they want to do, to do all the things that they're being asked to do. So yeah, every team thinks that they should get that headcount. It's hard to know what's right. Do you need more capacity to make new features? Do you need more capacity to keep things up, or to make the platform better so that people can deploy quicker or whatever? It's not like it's an even comparison. It's really hard to know what the exact right decision is, and newsflash, you're never going to know what is exactly right there.

Ben Ford [8:01] That is so true. But at the same time, sometimes I look at that same sort of metric there and I go, "What I really want is for that other team ..." Maybe support. Maybe I want another support engineer so that they can reduce the number of escalations that keep coming up to me. And so understanding that there's a bigger goal rather than just my own specific team goal is key to being able to work as an organization together.

Josh Zimmerman [8:27] Right.

Ben Ford [8:28] How do you recommend people understand their organizational structure and how that influences how they engage with each other?

Josh Zimmerman [8:36] Yeah, so I think a key piece is that a lot of people start with their org chart. And org charts are ... They're comfortable lies. Org charts leave way too much contextual data on the floor for them to be useful. They're useful, but as useful as people want them to be. And so at the end of the day ... and I live in the Midwest, so this is super uncomfortable to people ... you have to ask questions, you have to talk to people, you have to really start understanding how and why things are happening. And so the org chart might be like the first place you look, but it certainly isn't really ... It's, I guess, a starting point, but it's not much of one.

Ben Ford [9:21] It is kind of funny. You're sort of pushing on one of my personal trigger buttons there, is that when I work with the product team and I'm trying to figure out who's working on a certain product, or, "Hey, I have a question about this thing. Who do I go to?" the org chart never tells you. And there's even a confluence page that describes who's working on every project, and it's always out of date. I'm like, "Can we please just make this discoverable?" But now there's never that single source source of truth. It's always talking. It's always engaging with people.

Josh Zimmerman [9:54] Yeah, and so much of what you actually need is the historical information. Sometimes it's, "What decision was made five years ago that is impacting this now?" So one of the best resources that you can find is there's always a handful of organizational historians that you have, the people who just ... They've either been there for forever or they've done this work, and they're super happy to talk about every single thing that happened to the company ever and why things are the way they are. Those are really your best source of knowledge on this kind of stuff, because it's going to help you figure out ... One of my biggest complaints about org charts is that power across an organization is very asymmetrical. Just because the head of operations and the head of development both report to maybe a VP of engineering doesn't mean that the VP of engineering listens to them equally or that the CEO or CTO listens to them equally.

Ben Ford [10:57] That’s a really, really good point. It's documenting the hierarchy of power; it's not necessarily how decisions are getting made.

Josh Zimmerman [11:06] Not just power, but also authority, because-

Ben Ford [11:08] Authority, that's a better word for it.

Josh Zimmerman [11:10] Because power is ... And I talk about this in the talk, is that power is more like "I can do a thing. I have the ability to do the thing or to make someone else do a thing, maybe," but authority is that being viewed as legitimate for some reason. So in our country, our constitution and our elections give the precedent authority. And so your standing on an org chart does give someone authority, but it doesn't necessarily give them power. And some of that comes down to trust, and some of that comes down to usefulness, to whoever needs them to do things. But that org chart just really doesn't tell you any of that, and so you need to suss it out by talking to people, by figuring out how things are actually getting done, as I said.

Ben Ford [12:02] And I imagine that the most effective way to do that is understanding both, like who has the authority to sign off on a thing, but who has the power to make that thing actually happen?

Josh Zimmerman [12:12] Yeah.

Ben Ford [12:14] That is brilliant. Do you have examples of how that might work, or some ideas about how people might be able to navigate that?

Josh Zimmerman [12:25] Do you mean in terms of figuring out who has that or ... Okay.

Ben Ford [12:32] Yeah, maybe how do you figure that out to begin with, and how do you keep track of who's doing what, or who has the authority, who has the power? I imagine if you talk to somebody that has the power and they make something happen, but the person who has the authority doesn't want to do that, maybe there's conflict. How do you keep all of those working together?

Josh Zimmerman [12:53] So first of all, I take a lot of notes during meetings, including things that aren't being talked about in the meeting, just so that I can keep things straight for the future and kind of, "Hey, this person talks a lot in the meeting and everybody listens to them. They're probably a good resource if I need to get x done. If I can get them to sign off on it, other people are going to do it too." But an important thing is just asking management and higher-up folks, "If I wanted to do x, how would I make this happen?" So a good example is when I was working for the University of Wisconsin, I was on a committee. Basically, one of the things that we ended up trying to do is that we found out that the administration of the libraries had a pot of money that could be used for bringing speakers in to give talks to the staff, or that kind of professional development, but it wasn't part of the normal professional development pots. And none of us really knew how it was being used, just that it kind of existed, because someone else had gotten some of that money to make something happen. And we were like, "This is kind of bogus that this pot exists. How do people get access to it?" So we asked. We went down to the administration and we said, "How does this get used? How do we do it?" And it turns out that they'd been actually kind of keeping it quiet because they didn't have that much, and so it was basically whoever found out about it and asked about it, kind of first come, first served. So here's this really great pot of money to do great things, and you just have to know about it. And so because of what this committee was supposed to be doing, we were like, "So, can we make this actually usable to people? How do we make this something that people can actually utilize? Because it's only being utilized by a handful of people, and not necessarily the people who need it the most.”

Ben Ford [14:58] Right. It was like the people who screamed the loudest, right?

Josh Zimmerman [15:02] Well, not just screamed the loudest, you just had to know about it. It was literally you just had to go down to administration or send them an email being like, "Hey, we want this speaker to come. They're $300.”

Ben Ford [15:11] I could see that being super problematic, especially when you look at diversity and disadvantaged groups. It's like not everybody has that brashness of being able to just go do it, right?

Josh Zimmerman [15:21] Right. And so we were actually able to fix that, and the replacement is more bureaucratic than maybe I'd like it to be and maybe the administration would like it to be, but it's equitable now. And we only found out about that and fixed it by asking about it. It's like, "Hey, if we wanted to do this, how would we make it happen?" And turns out that managers, good managers at least, are really receptive to those hypotheticals, like, "Hey, I'm not looking at doing this now, but if I did want to do it in the future, how would we make this happen?" And those kinds of conversations with people are really useful.

Ben Ford [16:02] The other thing that I think I might be ... and maybe I'm reading too much into what you said, but what I think I'm hearing you say is that they wanted to know how to do this. They wanted to do something better, but they just hadn't yet. And you coming to say, "Hey, can I help you?" It's like you both had the same shared goals, you just didn't know about it, and talking about it is what helped make that happen.

Josh Zimmerman [16:23] Yeah, absolutely. It was more that they just didn't have the time or energy to do it, and we had a committee of people who was responsible for doing that kind of stuff, so we did it for them and they signed off on ... we included them with the planning process for it. But yeah.

Ben Ford [16:40] That’s one of the things that I do a lot, is whenever I'm trying to make something happen, I try to figure out what people are incentivized by and I try to help come to mutual benefit. "Hey, I can help with this if you help with that." And it always helps when people feel like they're being appreciated or they're being helped by something instead of being bullied into it, right?

Josh Zimmerman [17:04] Yeah, absolutely. And another thing kind of off of that is when you do something like that, saying, "Hey, this is kind of weird. How would I help the next person doing this too?" kind of fixes a lot of those inadequacies in how our politics work.

Ben Ford [17:22] I love that so much. And it's cool too, because then you build a little bit of social credibility. You have this reputation for making good stuff happen instead of being confrontational about it.

Josh Zimmerman [17:33] Yeah. Trust goes a lot farther than authority ever will, and the people who are in positions of authority who people trust are the people that we like.

Ben Ford [17:46] Those are the effective ones. So, how do you build trust? What are your recommendations for building that trust to help you improve the way you work together?

Josh Zimmerman [17:55] I think one of the most important things to me is that we make a lot of mistakes in tech, especially when we're working with people. We're trying to move fast, we're trying to do a lot of things. One of the biggest things that you can do to build trust is to make sure that when you (censored) up, that you fix it. Not when you break something, you fix it. When you have damaged your credibility with someone else, when you have impacted them negatively, outages come into it, but "Hey, we derailed a week of your time because we needed something that wasn't on your roadmap," really doing what you can to make up for it, and not just apologizing, but actually fixing how those things work, making sure you don't do it again. It goes a lot farther than just our normal, "Oh, I said I'm sorry." You actually have to repair the damage that you've done. That's a really important thing for ... It's not just building trust, but it's maintaining trust, because trust is very easily lost as well.

Ben Ford [19:07] I have accidentally thrown people under the bus before and I always feel like the biggest jerk for doing it, and I always loop back and I try to make it better. I just don't always know how to make it better.

Josh Zimmerman [19:18] Yeah, it's hard. There's a reason we can't write a manual for how to do it, and each case is unique. And so it really comes down to ... You can't just wave it off, because yeah, otherwise, the easiest way to build trust other than that is you kind of just have to do your stuff. People trust people that they see getting things done. People trust people that help them. We're in the DevOps community, and so everybody has at least once heard Andrew Clay Shafer say, "Chop wood, carry water." That's part of what you do. You got to chop wood, you got to carry water.

Ben Ford [20:01] Absolutely. So for the people who haven't heard that, how would you describe that real quickly?

Josh Zimmerman [20:06] Yeah. So the phrase itself comes from Buddhism, I believe, and that's actually a shortening of the full phrase, which in totality is basically meant to say, even if you are enlightened, even if you've become a Buddha, you still have to make these basic needs get met. You still have to carry water to make sure that you have water, because when the phrase was created, you'd be carrying it from a well or from a river. And you still need wood for making a fire so you can cook, so you can stay warm. Even if you're a principal engineer, there are things that you need to get done for your organization. You can't just wave them off because you have the status. Oftentimes when we use it, it's really talking about executing on the day-to-day things that need to get done for your team.

Ben Ford [21:02] And I think that's kind of key too, is for your team and for your organization, it's not just enough to be right. It's not just enough to be correct or to get your own stuff done, but it's also you have to show up, you have to do the work, you have to help the entire team level up, because that's what we're there for.

Josh Zimmerman [21:21] Yeah. A good example is code reviews. Most people don't want to stop the work that you're doing to do a code review, but it turns out that if nobody on your team is doing code reviews, all of the work stops at a certain point.

Ben Ford [21:35] Yup.

Josh Zimmerman [21:37] So yeah, the code reviews need to happen.

Ben Ford [21:39] Yep. It's like there's so many different things that ... That's just a day-to-day getting stuff done, but at the same time, you're also helping level other people up, and you're also helping deepen your own knowledge about the particular thing that you're working on. It's like nobody's too high to stop learning. You never stop learning.

Josh Zimmerman [21:57] Right. And getting back to examples of building trust, turns out that if you're willing to make the time often to give people code reviews, they will come to you to ask for your advice, to ask for more reviews. They will begin to trust you more because you are taking the time to do that for them.

Ben Ford [22:20] Absolutely, and just being willing to be proved wrong or being willing to learn from people or learn new ideas. I think it's all ways of just being there as a human for another human.

Josh Zimmerman [22:27] Yep. A lot of how I think of this stems from doing very basic reading of anarchy as a thing, and one of the things that you hear in anarchist circles a lot is, "We take care of us." And I think that's a really important and really strong thing, is your team, your organization, needs to take care of each other as people. You're not just a company; you are individuals who are all working for that company.

Ben Ford [22:35] Exactly. And that's how you work effectively together, is you know how not only your part works, but you know how the organism, if you will, works. One pushback that people often have about the idea of politics is that idea of walking the line of subverting hierarchy or going around somebody's back, or people have these ideas that you're playing games. So what advice do you have about that, about how to understand how to do that without ... I don't know, without stepping on toes, without offending people, keeping everybody on the same page and the same team, et cetera?

Josh Zimmerman [23:03] Yeah. Part of it is that 99% of our organizations are very hierarchical, and as you said, doing things that don't match with the hierarchy can chafe people of the hierarchy. So first and foremost, one of the important things is to build authority and to build trust in non-hierarchical means. If you can do those things to help out people on other teams, if you're an ops person and someone on the other team is having problems running things on your Kubernetes platform, take the time to help them, because they're going to remember that you help them. And if you do that often, they will begin to trust you and come to you as the person who can do things, and building that trust across the organization can help you get things done when the hierarchy fails you. But in general, partly I've had good managers, and not everybody does, but you can ask your manager if you can go around them. I think people don't realize they can do that or don't realize that they can ask that, but it's like, "Hey, you're really busy. You don't have time for this concern of mine. I need to get this done, either for me or for the team or for the organization. Can I talk to your manager to help with that? Because maybe he has time for that even if you don’t."

Ben Ford [25:14] Yup. I have kind of a silly, funny story about that. I remember I had this manager who was very adamant of, "You don't go talk to that team. You never talk to that team. You go through me, and I'll go shuffle all the bits, do the pieces, be the conduit," whatever. And it went on for months like this, and was so ... This person was a blocker. It was a bottleneck, because everything had to be funneled through. And as it turned out later on down the road that they thought that they were protecting us, and they thought that they were doing a good thing by making sure that they were the ones that had to ... They were that meme of the warrior standing over the little girl with the arrows in them. It was like he totally thought that that's what he was doing, and when he understood that we really just needed to have a little bit of contact with each other and be able to talk and share information back and forth, it's like productivity shot through the roof.

Josh Zimmerman [26:10] Yeah.

Ben Ford [26:10] It was like knowing how to go around that as needed, but without offending the guy. It was perfect.

Josh Zimmerman [26:17] Yeah. I think this is an important thing, especially for junior engineers to hear, is you should be having meetings with your skip levels.

Ben Ford [26:25] I think so.

Josh Zimmerman [26:25] You should have one-on-ones with your skip levels. They shouldn't be as often as maybe your one-on-ones with your manager, but no good, functioning organization, at least in my opinion, doesn't have that happening at least occasionally. Your skip level needs to know who you are. You need to be able to ask them of things. Just such a fundamental thing that some hierarchies lack is ... Heck, if for no other reason than your manager could win the lottery and quit-

Ben Ford [26:58] You still got to be connected somehow, right?

Josh Zimmerman [27:00] Right. If that's not happening, you're either in a shitty hierarchy that you might want to get out of, or you need to ask and try to make that happen, because those one-on-ones are really important.

Ben Ford [27:13] Cool. Well, we are running towards the end of our time here. I am absolutely going to link to your DevOpsDays Chicago presentation, if that's cool with you. Because I hope people go watch this, because it was a brilliant piece of work. But if you had to just give the Cliff Notes or the TL;DR, the top two or three, "What are the things that people absolutely need to know about how to navigate organizational politics?" what would you say?

Josh Zimmerman [27:42] I’d start with, "Be the person who asks questions." You're not going to figure things out if you're not asking questions. And then going off of that, be the person who answers those questions for other people. Those two things are incredibly important. And I think the other thing is just ... People have been trying to do collective decision-making in politics, and running committees and meetings, and studying notes. There are all these things that go into this that people have been studying for millennia, and actually take the time to do the research on some of that stuff, because there's so much that we just reinvent, and reinvent poorly, because we're not willing to see what came before, understand what came before. And so, go out and do that work. Learn about how really stuffy Robert's Rules of Order committees work, because there's important stuff there.

Ben Ford [28:38] There is.

Josh Zimmerman [28:39] Right?

Ben Ford [28:40] I own that book.

Josh Zimmerman [28:41] Go out and study how ... the bad things about representative democracies and why we might not want reinvent them in our organizations, all of that kind of stuff. It's all out there, so the only excuse you have is that you don't have time or don't want to.

Ben Ford [29:01] Or the other objection, which I hope that what we've talked about today kind of alleviates, is that it's not important. Because I think it's absolutely, totally important. Maybe what I would sort of summarize how we talked today is to understand that ultimately we do all have the same or similar goals. It's just that our incentives to get there might be a little bit different. And working with other teams, if they want to do something different, don't just immediately think, "Oh, they're wrong because I'm right and I know what I'm doing." Think about why they're thinking that way, think about what's incentivizing them to have other priorities, and maybe you can come to some kind of, I don't know, agreement between the two of you. But that goes back to what you were saying, is just talk to people, understand, engage with people, and build that trust.

Josh Zimmerman [29:54] And I would challenge you a little bit. We're not always heading to the same place in our organizations. We don't always have the exact same goal, but at least our goals in an organization itself-

Ben Ford [30:06] In a healthy organization.

Josh Zimmerman [30:08]… they're at least not at odds. Our goals are usually not at odds with each other. Maybe the ways that we think we're going to get there are, but the goals themselves shouldn't be at odds in a healthy organization.

Ben Ford [30:18] This is a topic that has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, is just understanding why people engage the way that they do, and so this conversation is fascinating. And I really hope that this has inspired people to think more about it and to take some of these lessons, some of these ideas, and think more of your own. I don't think anybody's saying that I'm the authority or that you're the authority on this, but just the idea of engaging with other people and understanding why decisions are made in your own organization or your own teams or whatnot, I think that is absolutely critical. I'm going to make sure to link to your presentation, and if you are open to people connecting with you and engaging with you directly, how would you like for people to talk to you?

Josh Zimmerman [31:07] Oh, well, I used to be on Twitter/X, but I'm not really active these days. I'm on Mastodon and Bluesky. You can reach out on LinkedIn. I check it very, very infrequently. I probably haven't checked it since the conference and should fix that, but yeah. I'm @TheJewberwocky in as many places as I can be, so feel free to reach out wherever.

Ben Ford [31:29] Sounds good. I'll make sure to at least link to Mastodon and maybe Twitter/X. It is a total tangent, but it is a fascinating time to be on social media right now. It feels like everything is changing. Next year, everything's going to be different than what it was last year. And I have no idea where we're going, and it's kind of exciting.  

Josh Zimmerman [31:52} It’s exciting. It's also a little sad. We had built up a lot, but we've lost.

Ben Ford [31:56] We’ve lost a lot.

Josh Zimmerman [31:58] Which I think about when I started really interacting with the DevOps community. There's so many things that newer people entering our communities aren't going to have access to, or access to in the same way. And in the same way, it doesn't matter, but we're going to have to rebuild that somewhere, because that's how we all got connected.

Ben Ford [32:20] And going back to the whole theme of what we've been talking about, being connected and engaging and talking to each other is how we all succeed. Well, cool, cool. Thank you so much for being here, thanks for talking, and thanks for sharing such a resourceful and useful presentation, and I hope to talk again.  

Josh Zimmerman [32:40] Yeah, thanks for having me on.  

Ben Ford [32:41] And thanks everybody for listening, and thanks for being here on the Pulling the Strings podcast, and don't forget to check the show notes for all the links that we talked about, and we will see you next time.