Design for Power: Don’t Let Your Systems Engineer Own Your Company
1. How They See the World
Systems engineers don’t see features. They see:
- Control surfaces
- Choke points
- Failure domains
- Dependency graphs
They instinctively ask:
- What can halt the system?
- Who must approve change?
- Where does everything flow through?
They optimize for structural leverage.
That’s not evil. That’s wiring.
2. Where Power Actually Lives
Not in code volume. Not in meetings.
Power lives in:
- CI/CD control
- Infra credentials
- Database schema ownership
- API gateway design
- Cross-team integration layers
- “Architecture approval” authority
Own these → you own velocity. Own velocity → you influence strategy.
3. What a Bad Actor Can Do (Without You Noticing)
- Centralize all pipelines “for quality”
- Become the only one who can deploy
- Introduce custom frameworks no one else understands
- Declare everything “not scalable”
- Block roadmap via architectural veto
- Delay selectively
- Create complexity that requires them to exist
No shouting. No politics. Just structural capture.
Sun Tzu would call this occupying high ground.
4. The Founder Mistake
You confuse technical depth with neutrality.
Architecture is not neutral. Architecture allocates power.
If one person:
- Designs the system
- Controls infra
- Approves changes
- Holds credentials
You didn’t hire an engineer. You created a governor.
5. Defensive Design (Do This Early)
- No single deploy authority
- No private credential ownership
- No undocumented abstractions
- No custom frameworks without external parity
- Architecture decisions logged publicly
- Rotate operational ownership
If rotation breaks the company, you’re already captured.
6. Brutal Truth
A systems engineer who understands choke points can:
- Slow you
- Redirect you
- Outlast you
- Make themselves unremovable
Without ever raising their voice.
War logic: concentrate control. Startup logic: distribute control.
If you don’t design for power, someone else will.
That’s the whole game.