Having impact in engineering by supporting other people's ideas

A staff engineer recently asked me about having more impact and whether they should be generating more ideas. I didn’t think so.

Their organization has plenty of mid-level engineers who are coming up with great ideas every day: ideas that go nowhere because they aren’t quite robust enough or just don’t seem to gain traction. I suggested that the staff engineer choose one of those ideas, help make it as good as it can be, be very vocal about their support of it, and then give 100% of the credit to their more junior colleague. That’s where the impact comes from.

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