THE DICTATOR'S HANDBOOK AND THE POLITICS OF TECHNICAL COMPETENCE

Summary from the TLDR Dev newsletter

"The Dictator's Handbook” is a political science book that says that leaders maintain power by rewarding a coalition of insiders, with the size of this coalition determining an organization's governance style and outcomes. This framework can be applied to the internal politics of large tech companies, especially at the individual engineer and manager levels. However, unlike the book's premise, technical competence is an important "currency" in engineering, so competence politics plays a far more significant role for mid-level leaders focused on achieving tangible results.