Visibility and self-promotion is how you get ahead in the workplace. Staying quiet and focussing on good work because "it'll speak for itself" is naive and in general the result is only to be taken advantage of.
Staying quiet and focussing on good work because
"it'll speak for itself" is naive and in general
the result is only to be taken advantage of.
Yeah. I suspect I'm like most engineers in this regard: staying quiet and focusing on work that "speaks for itself" is my default mode of thinking and working.
But it is just an absolute disaster. Management certainly does not understand what you do. And if your skills are above average, your coworkers doing the same exact job may not even understand what you do.
If you come up with a clever solution, you need to promote it. You don't have to "brag" but you do need to tell people that you e.g. came up with an optimization that makes the thing go faster and you probably need to show your manager a graph demonstrating the thing you did.
If you think this is dumb, I don't blame you, but that is how things work.
If you want to fight this reality to some small extent, you can work hard to recognize your coworkers' achievements and clever solutions and promote them by word of mouth, to your manager, etc. If everybody did this then people wouldn't need to self-promote so much.
Entirely dependent on the company. The best people at the places I’ve worked have also become the people who everyone goes to for answers.
It becomes clear that everyone understands their impact. If a non-technical person gets something that works they don’t have any way to know if it’s better or worse than anybody else’s work though.
> A good manager should. A technical manager, doubly so, and if you're an engineer, your manager should be technical.
They really should not. Their job is to manage a team, not to replicate everyone else’s work to understand in detail how clever they are. It’s just impossible. Particularly as teams tend to have a distribution of profiles and skill sets. In this case, do you expect the manager to be a master of all of them? That is clearly unrealistic.
If you are a good engineer, you should be able to come up with some executive summary in 1 slide or a paragraph to outline what’s good in whatever you came up with. Otherwise, it means that you don’t understand what you’re doing or that you’re bad at bringing information together and condensing it in an understandable form, which is really not great for a technical role.
> Of course you're ultimately your best cheerleader and hypeman, but your manager should be doing that job too, especially to other higher-ups.
If incentives are set up correctly, a manager will advertise to the top. They should be rewarded when their team perform well, so it’s in their interest to publicise successes. (Bad managers will do it whilst claiming the credit for themselves, but that’s another problem). They cannot do it if you don’t provide them the information they need, though.
> Yeah. I suspect I'm like most engineers in this regard: staying quiet and focusing on work that "speaks for itself" is my default mode of thinking and working.
It is a natural tendency for a lot of people. I know I tend to do it because I don’t like when my work has flaws, so I spend way too much time making sure everything is perfect before I dare showing something to others. It’s still something to overcome because being quiet in one’s corner is counter-productive in the long run.
> If you come up with a clever solution, you need to promote it. You don't have to "brag" but you do need to tell people that you e.g. came up with an optimization that makes the thing go faster and you probably need to show your manager a graph demonstrating the thing you did.
Exactly! It makes the manager happy because they feel they understood something and it makes you happy because you feel like the value you bring is recognised.
> If you think this is dumb, I don't blame you, but that is how things work.
It’s not dumb, it’s adapting to one’s environment. It’s hubris to think that all the other people around have the same priorities as you. They have other interests, other skills, other objectives, and they also have only 24 hours each day. When you spend time to engineer something, they don’t have the skills or the time to study it in detail, therefore they cannot grasp all the cleverness in it on their own.
That’s not because managers are stupid or MBAs or something. The same is true in a team of engineers. A single person is not able to keep track of everything their colleagues do. So the quiet worker doing their thing in their corner is also missing out. It’s just that they have other things to do. So if you want them to know how clever the thing you did is, just tell them. People respond quite well if you show them something interesting (though, as you say, bragging is bad and is usually seen as a problem, not a sign of brilliance).
The key is to talk about the thing and how it solves whatever complicated problem was limiting, not about how bright you are for coming up with such a solution. It makes for interesting conversations as well, because the other people also have clever ideas every now and then, and that way you can hear about them. Because yourself are not necessarily aware of how brilliant your colleagues are if they never talk about what they do.
> If you want to fight this reality to some small extent, you can work hard to recognize your coworkers' achievements and clever solutions and promote them by word of mouth, to your manager, etc. If everybody did this then people wouldn't need to self-promote so much.
Yes! Another consequence is that this way there is more communication and more cross-pollination, and everyone wins.
I second this. It may sound as a surprise for many, but the reality is that it is very hard to justify to upper management any salary increases for the quiet high-performers, that just get work done without self-promoting and being vocal about it.
The system is based on the perception of "urgency" and "high-priority". If it not urgent to give a good salary raise or promote someone, they will be perceived as happy in the current position and be overlooked, until they leave.
In a lot of places, "self promoting and the theatrics of demonstrating impact" as this Ex-Google employee put it[1], is becoming more important than the actual work itself. People are rewarded for their ability to market themselves, talk about what they [may or may not] have done, and their efforts to document the work. The people actually doing the work but failing to loudly tell everyone about it? It's as if they aren't doing anything.
I'm very much the stay quiet and focus on your work type, and I agree with you on this, but I will say there are exceptions.
Some companies really do value good work. Speaking as a developer if a team I'm in has a good technical lead then they tend to know when someone is just talking a good talk, but isn't technically that strong.
Also, I think knowing when to speak is almost just as valuable as speaking often in many cases. Even if you don't say much if what you say has a lot of value people will recognise that.
Although at a certain level your ability to spew BS becomes far more valuable. A CEO of any corporation is basically a professional at the art of BS.
The article strikes a difference between promoting yourself, and what they are calling 'loud laborers'. It sounds like the latter are the type of people that are ineffective in their role, but constantly broadcast their intention to do something, or that they are doing something, or that they were about to do something. I've worked with these types of people before and they are supremely irritating.
I agree these people are irritating but when I look at the people that move up on my org it’s mostly “loud laborers“. They jump on a lot of initiatives championed by upper management, achieve nothing but in the end upper management and the loud laborer present the whole thing as huge success. I have seen that multiple times.
I read the other day something that made a lot of sense, which was along the lines that "people making the real decisions about salaries and promotions are managers, so it explains why highly aligned 'managerial' types get the best benefits".
It's huge flaw in the system, but not sure how to fix.
I've seen people build entire careers on simply figuring out what project is favored by upper management and doing everything they can (short of actual work) to associate their names with that project.
This is one of the reason mixed office environments (remote & in the office) can be very challenging for remote employees. It's much easier to get incidental recognition in conversations around the water cooler and walking in the halls with management. Those types of things need to be more intentional and explicit if you're a remote employee. It's way too easy for good work to just go unnoticed.
Managers it's part of your responsibility to help your workers get the recognition they deserve, but this is especially true for your remote workers due to the circumstances above. Competent remote workers who need little oversight are at the highest risk of this missed recognition and are in the best position to quietly find another job if they don't see it. You should always be looking for opportunities to highlight the accomplishments individuals on your team as well as the team itself. Publicly failures are your fault while wins are thanks to your team.
> Managers it's part of your responsibility to help your workers get the recognition they deserve, but this is especially true for your remote workers due to the circumstances above.
Yes, this is also a recurring topic. My approach to this as a manager is to give sort of an overview about the system so that people understand how it works in our local context.
It starts with "first, do you job and don't try to hide in case you make a mistake. But here is the people (mental list) that *need to* have visibility of your work and here are the main forums we need to get your work visible."
TBH, I don't think it is really within my power to change the system and make it fair. So if I can advocate for a better improve to people in my team, I just do that. If other managers are not acting strategically, well, that's their loss.
I've been successful in this way over the last many years.
This is an awesome manager style imo. Figure out how to promote your employees within the system that exists and make them aware of what they need to do as well politically. Many managers dont even do that. They just kind of let the employees flounder.
It's better to go somewhere where your colleagues and hopefully management are intelligent enough to recognize loud laboring as vulgar and an anti-signal.
I think this is one of the tropes that assume that senior management is basically made up of people who have no idea how to do "work" and who have the inclination to make the most ineffective decisions.
In reality, there is a distribution of talent among senior managers, and although they often do not seem to be the geniuses they are supposed to be, they are often better than the caricature that is made of them (except for my boss, who is pretty bad).
It follows that, in my experience and that of many others, the 10x engineer is not assigned a 10x higher job, but is more likely (we must always remember statistical distributions) to be assigned a job that has a greater impact for the organization or company.
The way it works is the manager of the 10x engineer has already scheduled 100% of his time.
The manager of a different team asks to borrow the same engineer for a week. The engineer’s managers obliges because he is a team player. However he does not adjust the schedule or reduce the engineers’ workload.
Junior engineers will place demands that said engineer mentors them. Again no additional time is allocated.
Meanwhile the high impact project literally affects the survival of the company. But hey the 10x engineer is a team player. He is the golden goose that deserves to beaten so the company extracts as many golden eggs as possible. Never mind if the golden goose dies. The company can always find another. /s
Yes, that's what I was saying is unlikely to happen, not impossible, certainly.
The top players are generally recognized as people to be supported, put on high-value projects, and kept happy.
The comment says the opposite happens, which is that the top engineers are not put in a position from which they can do the best work, but in one from which their productivity declines, the high-impact project is not done or deployed, until eventually the top engineer leaves the company, for, presumably--since why one company should be different from another?--another company where they will find the same frustratingly poor use of their talents.
One of the problems I see is that many people see themselves as high-level engineers (or athletes, or professionals), but are not seen as such by others. In some cases, others are "dumb"--we have all been there--but in other instances management, which is not made up of all "dumb" professionals, may not see the talent that the alleged top engineers think they possess.
> Visibility and self-promotion is how you get ahead in the workplace. Staying quiet and focussing on good work because "it'll speak for itself" is naive and in general the result is only to be taken advantage of.
It really depends.
Self-promotion really helps with internal promotion. But it seems like the best way for entry-mid level employees to progress their careers is external promotion aka taking a better job with another company.
For more senior workers, the political game is probably necessary to participate in, simply because it's more and more part of the job inherently. And there are fewer openings in other companies to jump into.
Adding additional info for very large corporates. The mid-career employer jump that sets you up for director (or equivalent) and above is absolutely critical for advancement. You’ll need to build a base of support cross functionally and get tracked for executive rank/comp package from there. Once your executive track, it’s almost entirely a political game.
You’ll also need to be ready to move again once you get into the executive ranks. Typically true exec headhunters will become willing to talk to you at this point and you’ll have another significant comp rescope opportunity in your late 30s to mid 40s.
I’m in that stage now and this was a really good set of insights here (admittedly that I don’t quite fully understand). Open to DM? My email in profile.
And that's a bad thing! Is it not my manager's job to keep track of what I'm doing? I generally hate self-promotion, unless it's of the kind that is directly useful to other people in the moment.
This is the very reason why I loathe performance reviews.
If they will not take into account actual work done, why should I subject myself to a multi-day of interviews and polls and whatever the bored people at HR came up with?
I learned this the hard way. In any organization, if it is not written down eg emails, word documents, or tech docs then it doesn’t exist.
Make sure your contributions are recorded. Even better is for you to volunteer to take notes and email them to everyone after any meeting or discussion of consequence.
If someone complains loudly, I go out of my way to help them, and then turn back to my quiet good work. I pivot sqls, I convert code to use memoization, switch to binary search or breadth first, I let them know everything I do step by step and make sure they understand. It's quick, helps me unwind from work while being kind, and it pays off very quickly.
I think I have a problem with the term "true believers", though.
I am not motivated to work by wealth, and am certainly not going to engage in more than the bare minimum of self-promotion (which has in no way hurt my career).
But the only companies I've worked for where I've been a "true believer" have been the companies I've started.
I am motivated by the work itself and the working conditions.
I don't brag about myself, in large part because I find it so annoying when others do. I am an example of how doing that, at least in the right sorts of companies, is not necessary. Further, it can be actively damaging as it decreases the willingness of others to work with you.
Because it's so extremely rare that the reverse is true. Most companies couldn't give a single shit about true believer employees. I worked in game dev, I've known many true believers over the years. None remain so.
Do not confuse this with a problem with the employee. There is a serious problem with the business if the main factor for advancement is not related to the work that the employee does. If that's not rewarded, you are explicitly asking them to do the minimum.
In my 3 software engineering jobs this has been true in 1 case and thankfully not true in 2 cases. I have extreme difficulty promoting myself in a work environment but I have had good people as bosses enough times that my work hasn't been quietly ignored.
Trying to do the "right thing" in opposition to what your boss is asking for is the killer. Two things you need to understand are: 1) Your boss has a broader perspective than you and knows how your work fits into the bigger picture of the org. 2) Your boss is the only person, in a traditional hierarchical capitalist company, who is empowered to reward you for anything. Pleasing the PM or that manager of that partner team only pays off if it is positively received by your direct manager, because those other people literally can't give you more than a fist bump for your efforts.
