Coworkers and counterparties, turns out it's the same game

I was digging through my old reading list recently and came across an essay about "why some people climb the ladder faster than everyone else." Reading it felt like getting my first two years on the job described back to me, word for word.

Back then I believed one simple rule: do the work well and you'll get noticed. Write correct code, close the bugs, ship on time — everything else wasn't my problem. Who argued loudest in meetings, who was cozy with whom, who controlled the budget — I filed all of that under "not my business" and didn't even bother listening.

I've been in tech long enough to have watched this scene play out more than once: the projector's on in the retro meeting, the slide deck is open to the proposal page, and the person standing up presenting the plan is someone else — even though I wrote the code. He'd already said the right words to the right person. I hadn't even thought to ask who the right person was.

Some people only care about the work itself — did the project ship, does the system run. Call that the fundamentals. Others pay attention to the players in the game — who calls the shots, who cares about what, who can cover for whom. Call that reading the game. Fundamentals-only players think they're taking an exam. Game-readers know it was never an exam — it's a group of people crammed into the same seat, playing each other. Show up daily and you call them coworkers; run into them somewhere else and you'd call them counterparties.

The difference isn't who works harder. It's whether you bother asking one more question: beyond getting this done, whose interests did it touch, whose path did it block, whose reputation did it build. Fundamentals-only players skip that question. Game-readers treat it as basic homework, no different from writing code.

None of this is a pitch to go study "people" full time. Pour all your attention into reading the room and let the actual work slide, and you crash a different way — a game-reader who fumbles the work looks worse than a plain fundamentals player who never learned to play politics, because they can't even fall back on "at least I get things done." I've watched someone lose an entire stockpile of goodwill the moment one project blew up.

Technical people are especially prone to trusting fundamentals alone. We're used to problems having right and wrong answers, and to something running or not running. "Who cares about what" doesn't come with an answer key, so it naturally sits outside our comfort zone. Writing it off as noise isn't being above it all — it's only learning half the job.

I never turned into someone good at reading the room — not much talent for it, and not much interest in practicing either. But I changed one thing: after finishing something, past just asking "did it get done," I now ask one more question — who cares about this, and did I make sure they knew. I used to think that question didn't matter. Turns out the points I was leaving on the table were sitting on a scorecard I never checked.