[vkou]

You're not making a great case for senior ICs being impactful.

I mean, what you described is one way to deliver senior-level impact for a team.

However, this has a very important problem. Every time you join a team, you have to build up this rapport from scratch. If you switch jobs every few years, you'll find half your professional time consisting of busting your ass to build up rapport, only to have to start from zero at the next job.

When you're hired as a manager, you don't need to do (this kind of) rapport building. You just tell people what to do, and they will build it.

[pm90]

> If you switch jobs every few years, you'll find half your professional time consisting of busting your ass to build up rapport, only to have to start from zero at the next job.

Not half, all of your time will be busting your ass building up rapport.

Lets look at the alternative: you start a greenfield project with no understanding of what the rest of the company's stack looks like. Engineers know some person was hired to do something, and they may be interested in what you're doing, but they're probably not invested in it (the people who hired you are probably more invested, but they're unlikely to be the ones who have a deep understanding of the tech stack). You're facing an incredibly uphill battle here, as there are certainly going to be things that you will need assistance with (custom libraries, weird deployment frameworks, shitty deployment scripts that only one person somewhere knows how to get working etc.).

You may be a super genius, super hardworking person and be able to pull it off. For the average case, I am convinced this is a backwards way to approach the problem.

[Spooky23]

Not necessarily. Positional power is only one aspect of a managers capability.

It doesn’t prevent you from using personal power and influence, although most organizations are setup to purposefully make it difficult to function that way.

Usually your best managers do both. Think of the best people that you’ve worked for in any environment. Usually they are people from whom you’d seek advice and counsel.

[LordHumungous]

> You just tell people what to do, and they will build it.

That's a pretty simplistic idea of how a manager wields influence imo.

[vkou]

It is a gross over-simplification - but I've had a lot of managers, and not once have I seen one bust their ass for a year, and then take six months to gather feedback and peer support on their work, in order to get the rapport necessary to do the job they were hired to do.

I mean, they do this sort of thing, in order to show that they are superstar, and should get 2x the headcount they currently have, but they don't actually need to spend a year and a half convincing people with results, in order to be allowed to direct their existing headcount as they see fit.

A senior IC, on the other hand, needs to personally prove themselves at every workplace, before they are allowed to act in the role of a senior. You're expected to deliver the results of a manager, without the corresponding power. You're expected to exercise soft power, and you're expected to acquire this soft power on your own.

It is an incredibly inefficient way of getting stuff done, if you ever switch jobs.