[csydas]

> The idea that your word is taken more seriously as an EM rather than an IC when it comes to (for example) needing to test more

i thjnk this has to do with where you’re testing your word as the power of a statement from anyone in an org from my experience has entirely to do with how much money is missed potentially by listening to someone’s opinion.

im quite far up the management chain in past orgs and while i could make calls like “no we aren’t hotfixing in a new feature the client wants in 2 days since it will never work well and that’s not enough time to properly smoke test this very involved feature.”

the rnd team loved this statement because they understood it and agreed with it and saw i took their concerns seriously.

sales management was pissed understandably as the client abandoned the negotiation because we didn’t meet their demands, no matter how right i thjnk we were to deny this request. but the argument got pretty far in the company despite the fact that everyone agreed it would be a disaster to do this.

it’s not really about power and position i guess, it’s how convincing you can be this is profitable for most companies. ego and power tripping are of course part of it but the ultimate decision is how well you can paint the financial prospects of it.

a similar request in the future was shit down faster as i asked the qa test to show on some mock code how many considerations we needed and the plain time for such a feature to be properly implemented — the financial impact was dire if we raced it out and that stopped the conversations very fast.