[vinceguidry]

As an individual contributor, your ability to fix organizational problems is limited and efforts to do so are almost inevitably plagued by wishful thinking. You're just not in a position to be able to change how people think about things. Your skillset is not with people, it's with code.

[skewart]

That really depends on the IC and the organization. That's probably true at some places. At a 30 person startup you'd be amazed at how much individual engineers can change things.

[soft_dev_person]

And here I thought I was cynical...