Influence, part 5 of 5: Organizations

 This is the fifth part of a five part series on influence as a Staff+ Software Engineer (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5).  I've ported this here from where I originally published it on Medium. 

Organizations

Organizational design patterns

For Software Engineers who’re senior individual contributors (ICs), the main pattern that seems prevalent is that a senior IC and Engineering Manager work together to share the responsibilities for running a team; often the IC will be called a Tech Lead (TL) or Uber-TL.

If you don’t plan on managing then it’s worth thinking about how that will impact your career and the sorts of roles you can and can’t take. Skills take time to acquire and you have a finite amount of time to do so! While it may be possible to stay an IC at some companies and not be a Manager that’s not always possible.

Likewise, switching from TL -> TL-and-Manager or TLM -> M shouldn’t be done lightly. You can definitely reverse these decisions but it takes effort. Before you decide on something like this, talk to people who have done it in the past and see what they think.

Networks

An an introvert, networking is something that used to terrify me. It took me a long time to realize that drinking coffee with interesting people entirely counts as networking and now I’m a lot less worried about it.

One useful tip is to keep a list of the interesting people you know at the company who aren’t in your team. Perhaps they were on your team and then moved to another one. This’ll give you an instant network of people you now know on other teams.

You can put your network to work for other people if they need a contact on a team and hopefully ask for the same when you need a contact somewhere.

See your credibility.