
Positional Dominance Is Making You a Worse Engineer
When a teammate proposed a better design than mine, my first instinct was to defend my own — not because of logic, but because it was his idea, not mine.

When a teammate proposed a better design than mine, my first instinct was to defend my own — not because of logic, but because it was his idea, not mine.

As senior engineers, we often hit the ceiling at some point: our individual output is high, but writing more code or spinning up one more cluster does not feel like the best way to make more impact. A more significant impact comes from multiplying our efforts. But how do you do that without a team reporting to you? How do you effectively involve peers in your projects, influencing their priorities when you don’t control their backlog or performance review? ...