> Role power is by far the least effective.

To be frank: it sounds nice, but I don't think that's really true. It's the power of "who's going to decide my promotions", "who is going to advocate for my team and get us more resources", "who approves my expenses", "who is going to protect me if something goes wrong", etc.

This doesn't give the manager a pass if their ideas are objectionable, but if they're credible, it's a huge advantage. Small disagreements disappear and people fall in line behind your vision, get excited about it, and make things happen.

In contrast, in an IC role, you can successfully push for initiatives, but you're always working against that dynamic. The merit of your idea aside, folks might simply feel that you're pushing them in a direction that's less likely to get them rewarded or recognized within their reporting chain. That takes extra effort to overcome.

Being very visibly anointed by some VP helps, but that's tapping into the exec's leverage, not yours. And that approach has downsides; I worked with more than one architect / uber-TL person who were universally disliked and feared. The perception was that they showed up to make your life worse by putting extra work on your plate, without having much skin in the game.

▲

JustExAWS 5 days ago | parent [-]

> Being very visibly anointed by some VP helps, but that's essentially tapping into the exec's leverage - an illusion of IC influence.

Of course that’s the play. Even a lind manager can’t get major initiatives through without getting the buy in from their manager. When I was working for startups, the director (1st company I had influence at) and the CTO at the second had been convinced of my idea and gave me the authority to pull who I needed to get it done.

Fast forward past BigTech to where I work now - a third party AWS consulting company, after convincing the powers that be of the market, I had it escalated to be one of the companies initiatives for the year.

But more so in BigTech, promotions aren’t completely on your manager. At least at AWS you had to have recommendations by I believe two or three people one level ahead of you and it had to go through a committee.

From talking to a couple of L4s that I mentored when they were interns and when they came back, they were both complaining about the promotion process even though their manager supported them.

▲

Jensson 5 days ago | parent [-]

> the CTO at the second had been convinced of my idea and gave me the authority to pull who I needed to get it done.

But that mean those people have the power, not you. Without that formal power structure you wouldn't do so much work trying to convince these people, the formal power structure forces everyone to try to manipulate and work with it, even you.

So it makes it so much easier to do anything if you are that high up person, imagine that was you, now instead of having to convince these people to do it now you just do it.

	▲	sokoloff 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Power structures exist in any group of size. Companies can choose how formal to make them, but they can’t avoid them. Imagine instead of having to convince the Director, VP, or CTO to support your good idea, that instead you had to convince 100 out of 700 people to support it, while at the same time, those 100 people are hearing good-sounding ideas from 99 people who aren’t you. I’d way rather work in the former than the latter.