[juancn]

I'm an influencer.

I have no formal power in the sense that people are not supposed to do what I say, so I have to be convincing, and influence others behaviors to make the software better.

This implies analysis and compromise, having meetings, mentoring engineers, and quite a bit of coding and research.

My work is less guided that when I was a junior engineer, in the sense that I'm meant to discover opportunities for improvement and give guidelines. This leaves time to pick what I should be doing next, where I'm adding the most value.

This changes from time to time, it may be figuring out a new architecture, fixing a bug, getting involved in product development or handling an incident.

An important part of the job is getting involved in production incidents, this helps grasp where are we struggling and opens the opportunity to guide development to a state where customers are happier and operational costs are lower.

You also start to be more conscious about company finances (how much it costs to keep the lights running) and start thinking in ways to get more from the same resources.

Even if I have no formal power, people tend to pay attention to what I say and suggest, so I need to be careful, because an off-hand comment can have a lot of impact.

Architectural roles live and die by their word. We lead by influence, so be cognizant of perception and careful when you communicate with others in every interaction.

[ryandrake]

I think "influencing/leading people who do not report to you" is one of the hardest, most underrated part of mid-level people's jobs. When you're a low-level Individual Contributor, it's easy: You're not expected to lead anything or influence people. Take your ticket, do a great job at it, then take the next ticket. You're given a task, design it, and implement it, and job well done. On the opposite end, if you're a director or senior manager with a big org of people who report to you, it's also easy (or seems easy from my vantage point): You simply say "we must do this thing" and people do it. In the middle, we don't have direct reports, and nobody has to listen to us, yet our job is to convince people to do the right thing. Very difficult. You need to be political, cognizant of perception as you say, you need to gather favors and then call them in, prioritize and horse trade for things that are important, and so on. Difficult job.