Senior to staff engineer curriculum, part 3 of many: sources of power

 Session 2: sources of power

Please read the summary of the book at the bottom of this post. (I couldn't find a good doc to link to so I wrote this instead.)

Prompts for discussion:

• Have you seen people fall into the trap of expecting something to happen because they have the most knowledge?  What happened?

• What type of power convinces you?

• Do you think this is the same for people in other roles?

• What sources of power are you personally long on? Or short on?

• Think about the last meeting you were in.  What sources of power did each of the people have in that room?

• If you’ve changed jobs or teams, what did you notice about the change in your sources of power during that period?

Homework:

• Notice sources of power and people using them.

The Elements of Power in Software Engineering

Based on Terry Bacon’s "Elements of Power"

Phil - Gemini wrote the synopsis but I edited it.  I also read the book so that you don’t have to.

Part I: Personal Sources of Power

These are intrinsic to you. They travel with you from job to job and are the primary currency for Individual Contributors.

1. Knowledge Power (The Foundation)

• What it is: Your intellectual capital, skills, and mastery of your domain.

• Engineering Context: This is your deep understanding of the tech stack, system architecture, algorithmic complexity, or the specific business domain.

• The Trap: Many engineers over-index here, assuming deep knowledge alone is enough to drive change.

2. Expressiveness Power (The Interface)

• What it is: The ability to communicate your knowledge with clarity, energy, and persuasion.

• Engineering Context: How well you write an RFC, Architecture Decision Record (ADR), or PR description. It is your ability to explain complex distributed systems to a non-technical Product Manager, or your capacity to lead a blameless post-mortem without putting people on the defensive. If Knowledge is your backend, Expressiveness is your API.

3. Attraction Power (The "Pair-Programming" Factor)

• What it is: The ability to cause others to like you and want to work with you.

• Engineering Context: Are you approachable? Do junior engineers feel safe asking you "stupid" questions? The "Brilliant Jerk" archetype relies entirely on Knowledge Power while bankrupting their Attraction Power. High attraction power means code reviews feel collaborative rather than combative.

4. Character Power (The Trust Protocol)

• What it is: Integrity, courage, honesty, and fairness.

• Engineering Context: Admitting when your code caused an outage. Giving credit to a junior developer for a great idea. Pushing back on a toxic deadline to protect the team's well-being. Character power builds psychological safety. Without it, your team will comply with your PR requests, but they won't bring you their best ideas.

5. History Power (The Shared Repo)

• What it is: Power derived from a shared past and familiarity with colleagues.

• Engineering Context: "We survived the great database migration of 2023 together." When you have been in the trenches handling a P0 incident at 3 AM with someone, you share a bond. It is much easier to influence someone when you have a track record of mutual reliability.

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Part II: Organizational Sources of Power (The Multipliers)

These are granted to you by the company structure. They can accelerate your influence but can disappear if you change roles or companies.

6. Role Power (Formal Authority)

• What it is: The power vested in your title (e.g., Tech Lead, Engineering Manager, Staff Engineer).

• Engineering Context: The ability to merge code, approve architecture changes, or dictate coding standards.

• The Trap: In healthy engineering cultures, relying heavily on Role Power ("Do it because I'm the Staff Engineer") breeds resentment and malicious compliance. It should be used sparingly as a tie-breaker when consensus cannot be reached.

7. Resource Power (The Tooling)

• What it is: Control over assets, budgets, headcount, or tools.

• Engineering Context: For an EM, this is headcount. For a Senior IC, this might mean control over the AWS/cloud budget, the CI/CD pipeline, or allocating time for technical debt reduction during sprint planning. If you control what others need to deploy their work, you have power.

8. Information Power (The Context)

• What it is: Access to crucial data and strategic context.

• Engineering Context: Understanding why the product team is pivoting. Knowing the Q3 roadmap before it's public. Having the ear of the VP. By synthesizing and sharing this context with your team, you empower them while simultaneously increasing your own influence as a key node of information.

9. Network Power (The Cross-Functional APIs)

• What it is: The breadth and depth of your relationships across the organization.

• Engineering Context: Knowing exactly who to ping in SRE when a deployment stalls. Having a great relationship with the Lead Designer or the VP of Sales. When you are stuck on a cross-team dependency, a strong internal network allows you to bypass formal ticketing bureaucracy and get unblocked quickly.

10. Reputation Power (The Cache)

• What it is: What others believe about you before you even enter the room; your personal brand.

• Engineering Context: Being known as "The Performance Guru" or "The person who always spots the edge cases." Reputation is a force multiplier—if you have a reputation for bulletproof architecture, your proposals will face less friction. However, it is fragile and takes years to build but seconds to lose.

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Part III: The Catalyst

11. Will Power (The Commit)

• What it is: The internal motivation, courage, and determination to actually use your power.

• Engineering Context: You might have brilliant Knowledge Power, write an eloquent ADR (Expressiveness), and hold the title of Tech Lead (Role). But if you lack the Will Power to step into a heated debate, challenge a bad product decision, or mentor a struggling teammate, your capacity for influence remains completely dormant. Will Power is the spark that ignites the other ten elements.