I'd beware conflating "interpersonal skills" with "playing politics."
Certainly there is a spectrum there.
The subtext of your comment is that the companies you mention were somehow duped into promoting these bad engineers to executive roles
I did not mean it that way in general, but in one particular case both ran the company into the ground, one by picking a wrong (dying) market, the other by picking a poor acquisition target (the code base hiding behind a flashy facade sucked). I am not claiming that if the company promoted someone else they would have done a better job.
Second, I think that the "playing politics" part is true at some organizations but not at others.
If we define "playing politics as "using interpersonal relationships to one's own advantage and others' detriment", then I am yet to see a company with more than a dozen employees where this wasn't commonplace.
If we define "interpersonal skills" as "the art of presenting oneself in the best possible light", then some people are naturally more skilled at it than others and techies rarely top the list.
As for trusting the management to accurately figure out who actually deserves credit, I am not as optimistic. Dilbert workplaces are contagious and so very common. I'm glad that you managed to avoid getting stuck in one.
Dilbert workplaces are contagious and so very common.
I have a working hypothesis that it is, to a large degree, a function of size. Pretty much all huge companies are Dilbertian, very few tiny one are. It's more complicated than just that because in large companies people often manage to create small semi-isolated islands or enclaves with culture different from the surroundings, but I think the general rule that the concentration of PHBs is correlated with the company size holds.
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