New post is up.

I spent weeks designing an access control system for our infrastructure -- three environments, multiple teams, a permissions model complex enough that every approach had trade-offs I couldn't fully resolve. I felt solid about where I landed. Then a teammate walked into the design review with a simpler model, and five minutes in, I knew his was better.

My first reaction was to defend mine anyway. Not because of the logic -- because it was his idea and not mine. That reaction is worth naming, because I think most senior engineers experience it and almost nobody talks about it openly.

The post is about what I'd call positional dominance -- the quiet need to be the source of every best idea in the room -- and why it's one of the most common ways Staff-level engineers undermine their own leadership. I walk through what the shift to outcome dominance looks like in practice, how to tell if you've actually internalized it or just told yourself a nice story, and the messier parts that don't fit neatly into a framework.