Software engineers have a tendency to view projects in purely technical terms fixating on languages, datastores and frameworks. While it is tempting to focus solely on tech, it isn’t enough to get you that next promotion, raise or bonus, you can’t ignore the soft side of software. As you grow in your career, it becomes clear that projects are made up of people with the inevitable personalities, emotions and opinions on full display yet odds are your computer education omitted people skills as part of the curriculum. This talk will help you wield influence in you org be it to convince management to upgrade to the latest version of your tech stack or help you customer understand why you need to pay down some technical debt. We’ll also cover the impact culture has on our work as well as how to manage the many stakeholders in our orbit.