This week I’m sharing a unanimous learning that came from a “Journey to Staff Engineer” panel I was part of. It is a small change that can have a big impact on your career. Here’s the article; enjoy!
Every time I see someone talk about writing a brag doc their face says "I talk from experience". I think we all have to feel the pain of collecting our undocumented achievements to realize its importance 😅
The challenge I see in all this "find a problem, fix it, and make it public" is: how to find the time for it among the other responsibilities, like deliver the backlog/sprint?
Our work should be prioritized based on the impact it has. If you find a problem that is more impactful than your other sprint work, you should be empowered to deprioritize the work that is less impactful.
That way you don't need to burn yourself out to take on work that furthers your career.
It depends on how your company communicates. Meta uses "Workplace" which is a product that lets us write posts in groups. Slack and email have similar ways you can share the results of your work though.
If Slack, I'd post this in a channel appropriate for launches/changelogs and tag relevant folks.
If email, I'd send it to relevant folks (involved parties, my manager, etc.)
I see, for an email for example you could title it update or follow up on blank task or problem. Something like that? and then follow the template you kind of described. I would assume you could do the same thing for a teams/slack channel or how would you modify my wording. When you are doing these updates is the wording and titling very important like does pick one way vs another way of describing the same thing make a big difference in how its perceived. Lets say you had a problem and you needed to reach out to this guy or this team do you mention that in this update or is that more stand ups. And even in stand ups what is an effective way to word when you were doing a task and needed assistance from someone. Does that show your resourceful, should you explain why you need them, or do they take in negatively?
> When you are doing these updates is the wording and titling very important
The specifics of your communication are less important. The template I shared is just a common format I use to communicate results (when I launch something or do something that is beneficial)
What is more important is to understand the end goal. You should strive to:
1. Share your results in a place where people can see it
2. Communicate them in a way that matters to your organization
Nice write up! It took me several years to realise not only in Engineering but in life, it's all about marketing, visibility, networking and even perhaps, unfortunately, a lot of lies and over sell. As an engineer who would be very strong technically and good with people but not having the energy to excel in those required areas, I struggled a lot, like a lot! to obtain promotions. Every time I requested promotions, I get presented a spreadsheet with baseline scores, etc to achieve. Then you see your peers with far less knowledge and accomplishments get promoted without any spreadsheet requirement. Very frustrating, but it all comes down to Self Marketing, visibility and networking.
Fun fact: I know an engineer that is Ultra present in Meet Ups, writes blogs, active on Linkedin, etc, etc. If you see his profile, you may think he is some sort of Prodigy. I worked alongside him and I can tell you he is a mid level engineer at best and A massive massive self promoter that tricks peoples mind into believing he is actually that good. He even become Director of engineering, just by talking his way up.
Very unfair, but that's is the game in the industry. If software were to decide who gets promoted and who won't I'd probably be CTO everywhere lol but, it's actually people who decides who gets promoted. That means, our work is to manipulate their brains into believing that we should get promoted, by the techniques mentioned in the first paragraph.
When it clicked on me?
I am a very fit person, many times I run up and down a stairway of 45 metres high. Once, I was doing it and since I am used to and have a big fitness level, I barely have to breath any heavier,
There was also this guy doing it, classic gym dude ultra muscled, shirtless, etc, he was doing probably a tiny fraction and breathing ultra heavy but almost like exaggerating the breathing. What happens? Obvs he would catch peoples attention to the point that a couple of randoms went to him to congratulate him on his physique and effort like if he was some sort of athlete. It was all a smoke screen, I was there and I have a 1000% better fitness level but nobody came to me to talk congratulate me about my fitness. That day I learnt how life is if you want to get noticed and get places: Marketing, Lies and Networking, will take you anywhere!
Such truth in this advice, Ryan! Crazy enough, this was the first thing I wrote about on Substack ("Make yourself known at work").
I love the template you shared. I've done ad-hoc formats but I think yours covers all the bases 😎
Just read your article (https://careercutler.substack.com/p/make-yourself-known-at-work), love the concrete tips. Giving talks is a great idea
Haha, its so funny to read back at that article and see how the writing style was.
I really like it as a first article though. Thanks for checking it out and reading it, and for the compliment :) really appreciate it.
Great aligning on the two articles
Every time I see someone talk about writing a brag doc their face says "I talk from experience". I think we all have to feel the pain of collecting our undocumented achievements to realize its importance 😅
This is a super good article! I have been finding the need for a brag journal on the internet so I ended up creating my own (https://workdiary.app)
Great advice Ryan. I once heard about a “brag document” and I’ve been implementing that. It’s a great complement for this. Thanks.
Thank you Bruno. Agree having a brag journal is a great edition to this. I think I’ll update this post when I have time to include that. Good idea!
This a great article, thanks for sharing.
The challenge I see in all this "find a problem, fix it, and make it public" is: how to find the time for it among the other responsibilities, like deliver the backlog/sprint?
Our work should be prioritized based on the impact it has. If you find a problem that is more impactful than your other sprint work, you should be empowered to deprioritize the work that is less impactful.
That way you don't need to burn yourself out to take on work that furthers your career.
Thanks for reminding us all of this fact, Ryan.
Do you send this as an email I don't understand by somewhere public. Like a page inside your companies Docupedia system?
It depends on how your company communicates. Meta uses "Workplace" which is a product that lets us write posts in groups. Slack and email have similar ways you can share the results of your work though.
If Slack, I'd post this in a channel appropriate for launches/changelogs and tag relevant folks.
If email, I'd send it to relevant folks (involved parties, my manager, etc.)
I see, for an email for example you could title it update or follow up on blank task or problem. Something like that? and then follow the template you kind of described. I would assume you could do the same thing for a teams/slack channel or how would you modify my wording. When you are doing these updates is the wording and titling very important like does pick one way vs another way of describing the same thing make a big difference in how its perceived. Lets say you had a problem and you needed to reach out to this guy or this team do you mention that in this update or is that more stand ups. And even in stand ups what is an effective way to word when you were doing a task and needed assistance from someone. Does that show your resourceful, should you explain why you need them, or do they take in negatively?
> When you are doing these updates is the wording and titling very important
The specifics of your communication are less important. The template I shared is just a common format I use to communicate results (when I launch something or do something that is beneficial)
What is more important is to understand the end goal. You should strive to:
1. Share your results in a place where people can see it
2. Communicate them in a way that matters to your organization
Okay makes sense and for this part what are your thoughts.
> Lets say you had a problem and you needed to reach out to this guy or this team do you mention that in this update or is that more stand ups.
>Does that show your resourceful, should you explain why you need them, or do they take in negatively?
Nice, I shared my steps to become an EM in (https://open.substack.com/pub/andredemattosferraz/p/how-did-i-become-an-em-and-why-en?r=33udy5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcome=true) and tried to explain how I do it "be visible"
Nice write up! It took me several years to realise not only in Engineering but in life, it's all about marketing, visibility, networking and even perhaps, unfortunately, a lot of lies and over sell. As an engineer who would be very strong technically and good with people but not having the energy to excel in those required areas, I struggled a lot, like a lot! to obtain promotions. Every time I requested promotions, I get presented a spreadsheet with baseline scores, etc to achieve. Then you see your peers with far less knowledge and accomplishments get promoted without any spreadsheet requirement. Very frustrating, but it all comes down to Self Marketing, visibility and networking.
Fun fact: I know an engineer that is Ultra present in Meet Ups, writes blogs, active on Linkedin, etc, etc. If you see his profile, you may think he is some sort of Prodigy. I worked alongside him and I can tell you he is a mid level engineer at best and A massive massive self promoter that tricks peoples mind into believing he is actually that good. He even become Director of engineering, just by talking his way up.
Very unfair, but that's is the game in the industry. If software were to decide who gets promoted and who won't I'd probably be CTO everywhere lol but, it's actually people who decides who gets promoted. That means, our work is to manipulate their brains into believing that we should get promoted, by the techniques mentioned in the first paragraph.
When it clicked on me?
I am a very fit person, many times I run up and down a stairway of 45 metres high. Once, I was doing it and since I am used to and have a big fitness level, I barely have to breath any heavier,
There was also this guy doing it, classic gym dude ultra muscled, shirtless, etc, he was doing probably a tiny fraction and breathing ultra heavy but almost like exaggerating the breathing. What happens? Obvs he would catch peoples attention to the point that a couple of randoms went to him to congratulate him on his physique and effort like if he was some sort of athlete. It was all a smoke screen, I was there and I have a 1000% better fitness level but nobody came to me to talk congratulate me about my fitness. That day I learnt how life is if you want to get noticed and get places: Marketing, Lies and Networking, will take you anywhere!