The Authority Trap
New Staff Engineers often make the same mistake: they try to drive change the way a manager would - through directives, mandates, and escalation. It does not work. Engineers do not follow authority; they follow credibility.
Influence without authority is a skill. It can be learned. Here is how.
The RFC as a Change Vehicle
The Request for Comments process is the most underused tool in a Staff Engineer's toolkit. A well-written RFC does three things:
- Forces you to think through the problem rigorously before advocating for a solution
- Creates a written record that others can engage with asynchronously
- Builds consensus through iteration rather than confrontation
# RFC-042: Migrate Internal APIs to gRPC
## Status: Draft
## Author: @techarchitect
## Created: 2026-01-20
## Problem
Our REST APIs between internal services have no schema enforcement,
leading to 23 production incidents in Q4 caused by contract drift.
## Proposal
Adopt gRPC with Protobuf for all new internal service APIs.
Existing REST APIs to be migrated on a per-service basis over 6 months.
## Alternatives Considered
- GraphQL federation: rejected due to N+1 complexity at our scale
- JSON Schema validation: insufficient - no code generation, runtime only
## Success Metrics
- Zero contract-drift incidents in the 6 months post-migration
- All new services ship with generated client libraries
Building Credibility at Scale
Credibility is the currency of influence. It is built through:
- Shipping things - proposals that never ship are noise. Prioritise execution over elegance
- Being right in public - write down your predictions. When they come true, people notice
- Helping others succeed - the fastest way to build influence is to make other engineers more effective
- Knowing when to be wrong - changing your position based on evidence is a sign of intellectual honesty, not weakness
The Glue Work Trap
Staff Engineers often get pulled into coordination, documentation, and process work - the "glue" that holds teams together. This work is valuable, but it is invisible and does not build the technical credibility that makes influence possible.
The rule: glue work should never exceed 30% of your time. If it does, you are being used as a coordinator, not a technical leader.