Never get involved in office politics unless it will directly improve the development process on future projects. People will use you to get at others.
“One day the customer asked me for an informal coffee to chat about how the project was going. I knew she should be going through the project manager for the information, but she was the same customer who was paying all our salaries and I felt obliged to go. We had issues on the project, mostly to do with process (nobody had login accounts for a month) so I discussed them all strictly off-the-record. Or so I thought. The next day the project manager stood beside my desk demanding to know exactly what was said.”
So the rule is, unless there is tangible technical benefit to the development team in making political waves, leave it to the experts – managers deal with politics all day every day.
