Boy do I hate office politics...

A client asked our company to fix perf issues on their product. Our coleagues had been picked for the job [being led by another 3rd-party, as per client's request]. Aaand they dropped the ball. The deadline is in 2 weeks, nothing is working.

Mgmt engaged us to put out the fire, but strictly at the scope the other guys were working in.

On the first day of testing we've revealed an elephant-sized perf issue that's as easy to fix as brainlessly changing 4 values in config. And that elephant is masking all the other perf issues.

We got a firm NO for config changes as that is out of the defined scope. And we're asked to continue testing.

I mean, the elephant is THAT huge that any further testing is moot - all other bottlenecks are hidden behind it. And just changing those 4 values would reduce the resources required by a magnitude of ~10.

But that's out of scope...

Client is desperate, lost and honestly asking us, pros in the field, for help.. We know how to help.. It takes 10 seconds to apply the fix..

But our mgmt forbids us to step out of the scope :/

as a result we have to pretend to be dummies hardly knowing what to do and hide the truth from the customer they so desperately want.

This is frustrating. And wrong. And imo unprofessional

What is the most fucked up office politics you experienced?

my current boss i think. he's really good at office politics and he's very willing to help me navigate some tricky social interactions. he's also got very solid feedback

my current team leader (mini-boss, per se) is teaching me a lot of office politics. it's very enriching, since my soft skills are crap. also I'm learning when to keep my mouth shut (important survival skill, very hard to master)