I work in a factory, and the potential to move up to shift lead is all but given to me by my peers. Ive had several bosses and colleagues (who's opinions and world views align with us) tell me I need to become the lead. The guy I would be inheriting this role from even says I'm the best fit.
However I ain't trying to be some class traitor. I do like the thing we produce, it's been a part of my life for my entire conscious existence. I'm a lucky sucker who followed their passion and while I'm a wage slave, seeing people, even if it is the upper class, deriving happiness from the things I make make me care about the things I produce. I do want to use this position to make the product and the workers lives better. Management already understands I side with labor more often than not.
I am really good at what I do and I have tons of issues believing in myself, but it's hard to ignore the world telling you you got to do this.
lol yeah I did the same, I ended up leading because my shitty boss quitted and even took R&D made in house to the competition. I mostly just gave lenient timelines and refused last minute changes that were reaised by business managers that didn't follow proper procedure e.g. proper change requests with estimates and stuff. It wasn't even giving ridiculously long times or whatever, just stuff that I deemed was fair, we were the fastest team anyway and management still decided to screw us over by forming a new parallel team that was both overworked and churned out a final product like 12 months too late. I ended up quitting, I don't think I will lead anything again, kinda sucked. Management both plays favorites and just likes when people under them show "proper deference", even if the people that actually do this serf act are duplititous untalented hacks.
We do a lot of design work where I'm at currently and when I started, production times were abysmal and QA was garbage (unbuildable drawings being sent to construction).
I managed to hack together a couple thousand lines of code over about 6 months that automated about 50% of the work and 100% of the QA process. Basically upended the old way we were doing things and allowed for a massive increase in production, quality, and leisure (scripts take 5-10 minutes to run so the drafters get a few extra breaks).
It's weird seeing the power dynamic flip in situations like that. I moved up pretty quick and they tried their best to get me to be "on their side", but I basically told them "everyone needs raises right now." And they had to do it.
I've got that temporary break where my knowledge of my spaghetti code is the only thing keeping production afloat for the whole company so I can become that leverage for co-workers. At least until they decide that they're comfortable making collective actions themselves.
Yeah, it's very unusual too. Glad you took advantage of it. I did have overwhelming leverage for a junior/mid-senior dev, but the CTO was no dummy and knew I was uppity, that's why they ended up making a parallel team to mine and recreated my entire work from scratch. It's still kinda baffling that they did that instead of just acquising. Would've been a lot cheaper too.