Comment by captainkrtek

I'm about 12 years in myself and can provide some thoughts on this, though I'm not 20+ years senior.

My first few roles were in startups, where I got to be very hands on, learn a bunch, and mostly focus on the craft of software development and systems. I similarly felt I had a lack of higher-level understanding of business, management, product, etc.

I then went to Amazon for 7 years and this is where I felt I developed a stronger sense of the "business" side of things: politics, understanding what your customers really need, influence, delivering massive things across multiples teams and years of effort.

> I do my best to explain that and recommend alternatives, but more often than not it still happens anyway.

This is difficult to overcome, particularly on a short timescale. I felt this early in my time at Amazon at times, where I felt "right" but couldn't get others to see things my way.

The path there for me was first developing relationships with my peers generally, then establishing trust for my judgement. This came in the form of chasing ambulances, jumping into technical and non-technical problems unrelated to my direct team (eg: incidents), mentoring others. These activities are generally trust-building, and non-controversial/political. This also build some social capital, such that when I would speak up in a meeting or point out some flaw/gap (with data), people would listen more.

I've found it incredibly hard to influence without first establishing solid credibility, and vice-versa, if someone is new to an org, I will certainly listen, but I also don't yet know them/their background/or why I should outright accept their opinion as the truth.

Conversely, I have also seen people more senior than myself struggle with this concept. They show up in an org and repeatedly tout their resume, and expect acceptance "Yeah at X we did things this way", "I built x, y, and z". This has not worked well for them in my opinion.

The most influential engineers I've worked with had strong trust based on their actions and history of delivering, helping others, providing opinions backed in data, and being level headed. If they spoke about a problem it was something to listen to, not just a weekly complaint about something else.

Lastly, make sure whatever it is you work on truly matters to the business, and understand how it ties back to the business and your customers. It can be fun (or necessary at times) to be off in the weeds on something that is technically interesting, but really unimportant to the bottom line and ultimately to advancing your career.