"Why won't people listen to me???" cries the engineer who wants more influence, thinking that it's just a matter of getting the right role or title or reporting to the right person. I struggled quite a bit with this for a number of years.
This simplistic thinking is behind promotions at those stodgy, bureaucratic organizations who we all love to hate. Ever have your thoughts or work baselessly steamrolled by someone senior or with "Architect" or "Principal" or "Fellow" in their title? Exactly.
I call it the Dwight Schrute methodology of career development. It's almost as if a career is a role-playing game where it's just a matter of gaining enough XP to get to the next level. This is not how things work in the Real World™.
It is true that in the early stages of a career, it's possible to follow a somewhat predefined set of steps, but this path quickly runs out of steam with more and more experience.
There is one manner in which the Dwight Schrute methodology works: if the goal is to become a "company person," where your primary value is how well you can run the bureaucracy.
In the ideal (see my caveat below) of a high-functioning team, the way one gains this status is steady, smart work. That good old cliche applies here: "It's a marathon, not a sprint."
It means relentlessly delivering at a steady cadence on things that matter, not letting yourself get caught up in the hype while exhausting yourself at the first hurdle. I promise there will always be another hurdle waiting, ad nauseam.
It means having regular 1:1s with the peers you respect. It means just being there for them when they're frustrated. It means finding out what they want out of their career and helping them achieve it.
It means learning that what your boss tells you isn't gospel. It means going and finding the folks who really care about It and hearing directly from the source. And it means listening to their concerns 1:1 and getting their personal buy-in BEFORE the Big Presentation.
It's easy for individual contributors to be completely unaware of these things because they don't happen out in the open. These things don't happen on GitHub or in your team's Slack channel. They happen on phone calls and in meeting rooms.
It's understandably frustrating to see equally talented peers getting their work socialized, put on The Big Projects, getting promoted, and gaining influence – seemingly like magic.
But getting bestowed the Level 10 Crown of True Influence just means you're on track to be a pointy-haired boss type. The crown is just a signal that others should placate you, and then go about their business as usual.
You may remember another character from The Office, Michael Scott. You don't want to become a Michael Scott.
Of course, this is a bit idealistic and doesn't touch on the issues of systemic discrimination that hold people back. This is a huge factor, and people who face those issues (I don't really) have to work 2-10x as hard in these areas.
