After 11 years of development career as an individual contributor in some large companies, and team lead for start-up teams, I recently landed in a team-lead position in a company filled with hot political issues, backstabbing, favouritism, tremendous timeline pressures for modernization with little business benefit, executive/director level leaders who have no knowledge of internal working of the system, all experienced folks leaving after change in said execs/director, eccentricity at some levels, and so on. It is such a classic case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon for me that threads like [1] and [2] resonate a great deal. I do not want to turn away from this ecosystem for now mostly because I want to learn how to survive in such a political environment, and partly because if this modernization project gets delivered whenever it is, it will be a very good learning experience for me. While official and unofficial mentorship is an option from inside the companies, I am not sure if I...