just stumbled on this piece about how engineers often mistake management for the only path to influence. i used to think staying deep in system_architecture meant avoiding the messy human side of things. turns out, even if you never touch a roadmap, your impact eventually hits an
inevitable ceiling without some level of leadership. dont ignore the soft skills just because you want to stay technical. as you scale, the bottlenecks move from db_latency to people problems.
it is much harder to debug a team than a kernel. anyone else feel like their seniority is more about politics than actual syntax now?
found this here:
https://dzone.com/articles/leadership-software-engineers