* If you have good results from shipping a feature, be sure to send the results over to your team, and cc people as high up as possible.
* In team meetings, always speak your opinion but do it respectfully. People who are silent will likely get passed over for promotions. Unfortunately, this is how it works most of the time. If you are the silent type, schedule as many 1 on 1 meetings as possible. See below.
* Do not embarrass any coworkers in public. If you must, do it privately.
* Make your boss look good. It's hard to move up if your boss doesn't like you.
* Ally with the people who are important. Set up 1 on 1s with them. Talk to them. Ask them how you can help them. Praise their work. Generally, let them know that you exist and what you're doing to help make money.
These things work much better if you're generally competent, of course.
It reads more like common sense to me. And none of these are “selling your soul”. I could give you a list of much worse tactics that unfortunately tend to be quite successful.
The first point really helped me when I had a crappy boss who didn't like me but still liked to take my credit. I essentially jumped over my boss to make sure the executives, including the CEO, could see the work I was doing. Sending them reports directly from my email was the way to do it. My boss just got in the way. It really helped. Eventually, I even developed a relationship with the CEO. When I decided to leave the company, the CEO had a meeting with me and begged me to stay because he read all my email reports. This was a 3,000 something people tech company.
I know I also gave the advice to make your boss look good, which is plan A. If plan A doesn't work because your boss doesn't advocate for you in return, then you need to leap over your boss. Develop a relationship with your boss' boss so that you could ask to either get promoted to a position equal to your boss, take your boss' position, or transfer to a different boss.
As an Asian moving to UK, I’m annoyed that everyone is doing self promotion and I need to do it now… back then I could just do my job and show my performance
I think this has more to do with the organization's structure. In a flat org you're more visible and your work speaks for itself. And in a hierarchical org you're very invisible, and the higher-ups can only see (without effort from them and you) what's right under their control and in most cases you're only visible to your manager and immediate team members.
This doesn't sound right to me - in a flat structure the people who self-promote go up in the implicit structure of the team so self-promotion is more important, not less.
I think it depends on your definition of self-promotion.
To me, performing and excelling at your job should be sufficient to make you visible. In a flat structure you're known as the responsibile party for project X, therefore, the self-promotion is happening automatically, as opposed to a deeply nested structure where your department's name is linked to the success of project X, and within the department your team takes the credit, and to be visible you'll have to actively self-promote.
In the UK, "Asian" tends to imply "South Asian". Indians are quite good at playing the game and self-promotion. On the other hand East Asians less so. This is of course an over-generalization but I do think it holds some truth and that has to do with cultural differences, IMHO.
Yours is a broad generalisation, and one that has hurt my career in the past because of senior people who inevitably follow this chain of reasoning: "Indians are good at playing the self-promotion game --> shrikant is Indian, and he's not bigging himself up enough --> he must not be good enough --> meh, average rating, let's move on to the next person".
This hasn't happened everywhere, so I suppose it is down to organisational culture as well.
But also I guess my point is: even if broad generalisations hold "true", it's not cool to apply it to an individual.
Fwiw the Japanese girl on my team in UK back in the day kept winning prizes or whatever because she was such a diligent worker, so self promotion isn't actually everything.
I disagree, the organization needs to know that feature came from YOU. I'm very bad at this and I from my experience every time I don't do this some one else swipes in and gets the merit, e.g. my boss bragging they were able to successfully lead the delivery (they didn't even know what the feature was about it until after delivery), a co-worker (who might have helped rolling it out during onduty) etc. Promoting yourself is essential.
If you don't work to get noticed, people whose speciality is to scream and shout like babies while having absolutely zero technical knowledge are going to dominate. And there are a lot of them.
You don't even have to do that all the time, a few stern words once in a while are enough to put impostors in their place.
First, I’m convinced that doing a great job is still the foundation of success. Then, talk about it. As in: make others aware of good solutions or ideas you have. Doing good work “in secret” might be in vain, so there is nothing bad about a bit if self promotion if the foundation is there.
In an ideal company, people see through fake results and baseless self promotion. If you’re seeing super successful people which are only good at overselling their results, that’s a bad smell.
The rest won’t always follow, but doing good work is the first and most important step.
For me the breakthrough in my career was making sure the right person knew I was interested in a particular project, but that would have meant nothing if I hadn’t already built a reputation for good work.
I disagree. Many hard working people are practically invisible and get kicked when there are layoffs. I am not linking layoffs directly to invisibility, but I'd argue that promoting yourself and being known and liked by the important people at your job gives your position more security.
As an example, if you often hop on calls and assist team members, let it be known to your manager. That's self promotion.
Collaborate with your PO. If your team presents their work to other stakeholders regularly, volunteer to present. These are different ways to self promote by simply doing your job.
That's served me well for 25 years in the industry. I don't think this approach works everywhere - the larger the organization, the more you need to play this game. Since I hate that game, I've stayed away from orgs like that on purpose, done well, and have been happy.
Fighting to get you and your team working on good projects is underappreciated. In my experience it's easier to seek out high-leverage work and focus on it than to promote average work.
This doesn't necessarily mean backstabbing and team-hopping, although that does happen in some dysfunctional companies. It means writing up ideas or problems into plans that your team can take and work on, with your name attached; killing off bad projects and fixing timesinks quickly; committing to other team members when they have good ideas, so that you're overall more successful, and to encourage reciprocity; and setting up processes to either minimise distractions, share them around, or make the distraction an actual KPI.
For me it was by building useful side projects that other teams use.
It's a win/win/win situation; I learnt lots by building them, they help developers build good services by not having to reinvent the wheel, and they get my name out there.
Uhh it goes a layer deeper. This narrative that you must self-promote so much was always an illusion meant to make you look incompetent and foolish. After all, why would you need to if you're so good at your job? It always was, but especially now.
You've only ever had to hit your deadlines and justify the projects you take on (and be right). Easier said than done, but when done no amount of brown nosing from others can win. Don't even dip a single toe in that tar pit and you'll be fine.
You cannot live in ignorance of what metrics are being tracked or what the leadership's goals are. Ask questions and you'll get answers and then execute. Easy to learn, hard to master.
Work to a technically good level, always wanting to improve. Communicate well. Be positive and polite with your team. Be confident. These things will get you far.
In my almost-three-decades of dev I think I can narrow it down to two things;
1. Have a boss who doesn't take the credit for your work. If your direct manager is a decent person they'll put your work in front of leadership and attribute it to you. This has a very positive impact on your career.
2. Change job 'often', where often is a cadence that doesn't make it look like you're running away from things. Your best opportunity for self-promotion that has a high impact on your career is in a job interview.
However, I'll add a third insight - try to define success in a way that means you're feeling like you're moving upwards even if it's not recognized externally. Taking pride in the work you do, improving your skills, volunteering for challenging projects, etc really helps you feel like you're progressing, and that really helps with #2 above.
And if none of that works just pretend HN karma is an important metric. It works for me.
Your point number 1, while informative, is not useful.
It is not up to an employee to choose a boss. So really, the only solution to this issue is your number 2 statement -> change jobs often. This will get you away from a shitty boss, (and a good one). You have to get out from under a shitty boss. That is the only solution.
So really, your number 1 should be: Never work for a shitty boss. Transfer laterally or find a new job if you thing your shitty boss is going to be your shitty boss for more than 1 to 1.5 years.
If you can't get out from under a shitty boss because you must stay in a same location and there are no other job opportunities, or you have a job so well-paying that you will never get a high-income job like this and you have high-income requirements like private schools for your kids, then you just have to eat the shit and pretend you like it. Get your enjoyment outside of work.
I do it by engaging with colleagues in the following way:
“You need help? Of course I’ll help you with that.”
“Yes, I helped Carl with that thing”.
“Carl and I build this thing, it was his idea, I did x”
“Yo Carl, I like working with you. I have this idea, can you help me?”
“No, I don’t have time to help you with the same thing that I helped Carl with. I am working on x right now, maybe later”.
Also seeking advice from colleagues is a pretty low key way of self promoting. You are showing that you are working on stuff.
So be generous and at the same time set boundaries so people won’t take advantage of you. I would err on the generous side, my experience is people seldom take advantage.
If your workplace has yearly performance reviews, that's the primary occasion to list your main accomplishments to your boss' undivided attention. Most people hate these reviews, so it's tempting to make them as short as possible and give them zero mindspace beforehand. Resist the temptation. Prepare. Make a list. A written one.
I grew up around the kind of people who often bragged about their humility, which bothered me greatly, and I promised myself not to be like that as an adult.
The result is that I often use second-person pronouns to take credit for work I did alone. Once I got called out on it during a job interview, and I had to clarify that no, in fact, I alone was responsible for implementing this great feature I just got through telling you about. The 'we' was a figure of speech I used because I don't want to sound like a pompous ass who takes credit for all the work, even if I deserve credit for all the work, because I did all the work.
Simply using the right pronouns can be a subtle yet effective signal for the purposes of self-promotion.
That's funny. Because we is a positive. That is, you collaborated with others on your team and produced something significant. Why didn't they value that?
- Write an internal Newsletter or a blog, and talk about what happens around you but not about you. This can be a protected internal (work) but write it in such a way that you are OK if it gets leaked or opened up to public.
- Highlight what your other team members did and how you were there (helping, helped, gratitude).
- Try to highlight things that usually gets ignored. For instance, the DevOps that writes awesome documentation or the front-end developer hacked to get around some design quirks.
This is a long-tail activity. Be the person to bring their good work out to others. You don't have to be talking or "marketing" around but this is a silent but extremely powerful weapon. Of course, people will start to notice you and will definitely want to know what you do. By then, you won't need to.
It is very context dependent. I am assuming here you mean how to sell your work in your current organization, not in the context of getting a new job. And I am assuming you mean as an individual contributor, and as an engineer (e.g. not as a manager or in non engineering roles).
My advice, in the context of large organization (i.e. more than 50-100 engineers):
1. regularly discuss about expectations for next level/grade with your manager. Number one mistake I see are people talking about this 2 weeks before the evaluation period. Do not wait for evaluation period.
2. make it easy for your manager: ask him the information he needs, ask him who needs to understand your accomplishment, etc. Again, do not wait for evaluation period to start those discussions.
3. In the long term (your whole career), good outcomes and getting better at your job matters. But in the short/mid term (within your current job), self promotion matters.
In a large organization, just doing good work is not enough, for the following reasons
1. your promotion will depend on people who are not intimate with your accomplishment anymore.
2. the definition of "good work" is very context dependent: depends on your org, depends on the time, etc. What does your company value ? E.g. in most companies, the closer you are to what the execs value, the easier it is to explain what you do. Money is the obvious one, but that's not the only one. In some organizations, doing something with no business impact but very technically challenging can be rewarded. In other companies, this is not rewarded at all.
3. bonus and promotion budget: the more senior the role, the more it becomes a 0 sum game: for you to be promoted, somebody will not be. There is always a budget, people will fight for it.
4. as companies grow, there tends to be more standard processes on promotion. In practice, such systems will always reduce the variance. PG explained this well http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
The above is why in practice, you need your manager's help to understand what is valued and when. Good managers will know what is needed for you to be promoted to next level, and will help you building such a case.
my 2 cents, as a director-level manager, managing around 50-60 people and having been a manager for 5-6 years now, after ~ 12 years as IC in quite technical roles
I am fortunate to be in a position where I get to take on the role of "blame sponge" in product management. You can get a shocking amount of attention if you don't shy away from diving into taking responsibility for the outcome of projects. I always figure if you don't take on ownership when things go bad then did you ever really own it? I will say this is more effective with the actual "doers" at an organization. Exec teams may not take it as well.
If things do go sideways, the executive team does still appreciate properly managed retrospectives. You can both take responsibility for something and have it not be a shortcoming of you personally. "I could have suggested a change to process A to avoid this.", "I could have arranged a meeting on the topic earlier. Formalizing this as a step in the future will prevent this." People are constantly protecting their egos a that level and when an idea they signed up for doesn't go the way they want it helps to have someone who can unpack what occurred who doesn't go around looking for someone to blame. *Focus on process, not people* is something I carried with me from the nuclear industry. It helps to divorce egos from trying to address a valid problem with the org.
I guess always be transparent about what you actually have done when reporting, also it is good to have a written KPI tracker or something that would actually keep track of your accomplishments, your learning path and the next steps you will be taking in order to be successful. Maybe put everything on a kanban board.
When the time comes for reviews, you will have everything structured.
2) More specifically, that work needs to have direct and obvious impact on the business. The quality of your code is less important than the problem it solves / revenue it produces.
3) If you have aspirations to lead, then learn to collaborate. Learn to lead.
4) Learn to listen. You'll learn more. You'll understand when and what to self-promote.
5) Related to 2, 3, and 4, learn what the business values. If you going to self-promote be certain to be in the business' sweet spot, else no one is going to care.
1. Find a boss that you're compatible with and who's not the type that will take all credit for herself. A good boss is confident, loyal and bright enough to actually appreciate your best work. Your boss must also be respected in the workplace.
This may require a job change, even if you're happy with you salary and benefits and even tasks.
2. Make sure you understand the value structures of people arround you. In particular your boss and other decision makers, but also your peers and subordinates (if you have them). If possible, try to align your values and preferences with your surroundings. To an extent, don't come off as spineless. But it's better to make your disagreements known when it contradicts non-essential preferences.
If you contradict values that form part of the identity of some influential person around you, it may be almost impossible to ally with them.
3) For your work efforts, focus your output on activities that support the values of those you would like to have a good relationship with. Often that means make them look good. But it could apply to any number of other values, too. That could be working hours, code style/language, git patterns, keeping schedules/promises, etc.
4) Where your values do not overlap with others, don't expose them. Those could be political or technical or something else.
5) If some individual occupies some niche in the organization, be careful about acting as a competitor for their spot, unless you seriously want to challenge them for it. And expect to gain an enemy when you do.
6) Time your efforts wisely. Don't solve problems nobody cares about, unless they will blame you when they start to care about them. When people feel pain, though, being seen as the one that make the problems go away can be great self promotion.
This could involve putting in extra effort and/or if it can be resolved by leveraging some unique skills or talents that you may have.
Be mindful that this can make someone lose face. If those who would lose face are people you want to be allied with, it may be good to use some discretion.
7) If people take advantage, and exploit your output without providing proper credit, dont spend more energy on them than necessary. Focus your efforts to assist the goals of those who show appreciation in public or other ways that matter.
8) Volunteer to do presentations, internal knowledge sharing, coaching and similar work that allow you to appear as an authority, and take these activities extra seriously.
Do this both internally and externally if you can. External presentations may be the key to your next career step.
9) If you have side projects or things you've done in the past that you're proud of, just mention them in passing in situation where they're relevant, and without bragging. Reserve detailed elaboration to those who seem genuinely interested.
Let's say you contributed something to an open source project your team is using, it's much better that the team hears that from that person than from you.
However, if you DO have to bring such stuff up, make sure you hide your pride about it and focus on some other aspect (a compical element, the passion you have for some topic,etc). Beware, though, people are pretty good at identifying humblebragging.
Wrong question. Most don’t like to self-promote in dev. If you did like it, you’d be in sales.
Right question is ‘how do I get my contributions to be well understood.’
For that, you need to emphasize numbers. Every project, every task, every epic you ship has, at its heart, the goal to improve some metric in your business.
Do you understand what those metrics are? Do you understand why they are important to the business?
If the answer is “no”, then you’re doing things out of order. You can’t possibly hope to get others to understand your work if you yourself don’t understand it.
When you can say “I helped reduced latency by 237 ms”, that’s a good metric. Even better if you are curious enough to then connect it to the outcome - “which led to 17% longer sessions by users.”
When you master the numbers, then self-promotion becomes a by product of your work. E.g., at the team meeting “I understand our goal is to increase flip flops by 10%, is that right? Well, I think we can do it because when I was on that project with Team B last year we increased flib flabs by 12%.”
Summary: don’t self-promote, instead understand and communicate your impact on metrics.
- write tech docs with your name in them as a contact
- when someone complements you accept it and talk to them about your challenges in the project to make sure they don't think it was a breeze and you are proud of your work.
- present info on it to your group or "announce it" if it's something like a utility or internal tool.
- Talk at meetings rather than flipping through CNN, realize there are stupid questions however if you're trying to become better known.
- Don't be shy, but try to not be a braggart, confidence is sexy
50 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] thread* In team meetings, always speak your opinion but do it respectfully. People who are silent will likely get passed over for promotions. Unfortunately, this is how it works most of the time. If you are the silent type, schedule as many 1 on 1 meetings as possible. See below.
* Do not embarrass any coworkers in public. If you must, do it privately.
* Make your boss look good. It's hard to move up if your boss doesn't like you.
* Ally with the people who are important. Set up 1 on 1s with them. Talk to them. Ask them how you can help them. Praise their work. Generally, let them know that you exist and what you're doing to help make money.
These things work much better if you're generally competent, of course.
I know I also gave the advice to make your boss look good, which is plan A. If plan A doesn't work because your boss doesn't advocate for you in return, then you need to leap over your boss. Develop a relationship with your boss' boss so that you could ask to either get promoted to a position equal to your boss, take your boss' position, or transfer to a different boss.
To me, performing and excelling at your job should be sufficient to make you visible. In a flat structure you're known as the responsibile party for project X, therefore, the self-promotion is happening automatically, as opposed to a deeply nested structure where your department's name is linked to the success of project X, and within the department your team takes the credit, and to be visible you'll have to actively self-promote.
Yours is a broad generalisation, and one that has hurt my career in the past because of senior people who inevitably follow this chain of reasoning: "Indians are good at playing the self-promotion game --> shrikant is Indian, and he's not bigging himself up enough --> he must not be good enough --> meh, average rating, let's move on to the next person".
This hasn't happened everywhere, so I suppose it is down to organisational culture as well.
But also I guess my point is: even if broad generalisations hold "true", it's not cool to apply it to an individual.
If you don't work to get noticed, people whose speciality is to scream and shout like babies while having absolutely zero technical knowledge are going to dominate. And there are a lot of them.
You don't even have to do that all the time, a few stern words once in a while are enough to put impostors in their place.
In an ideal company, people see through fake results and baseless self promotion. If you’re seeing super successful people which are only good at overselling their results, that’s a bad smell.
Just do good work with and for your team. The rest will follow.
For me the breakthrough in my career was making sure the right person knew I was interested in a particular project, but that would have meant nothing if I hadn’t already built a reputation for good work.
As an example, if you often hop on calls and assist team members, let it be known to your manager. That's self promotion.
Collaborate with your PO. If your team presents their work to other stakeholders regularly, volunteer to present. These are different ways to self promote by simply doing your job.
This doesn't necessarily mean backstabbing and team-hopping, although that does happen in some dysfunctional companies. It means writing up ideas or problems into plans that your team can take and work on, with your name attached; killing off bad projects and fixing timesinks quickly; committing to other team members when they have good ideas, so that you're overall more successful, and to encourage reciprocity; and setting up processes to either minimise distractions, share them around, or make the distraction an actual KPI.
It's a win/win/win situation; I learnt lots by building them, they help developers build good services by not having to reinvent the wheel, and they get my name out there.
You've only ever had to hit your deadlines and justify the projects you take on (and be right). Easier said than done, but when done no amount of brown nosing from others can win. Don't even dip a single toe in that tar pit and you'll be fine.
You cannot live in ignorance of what metrics are being tracked or what the leadership's goals are. Ask questions and you'll get answers and then execute. Easy to learn, hard to master.
* Be vulnerable - see Brene Browns resources on that topic
* Share your accomplishments and also failures and how you learned from them
* Involve more people into what you are doing. Word of mouth works and if you are doing good job everyone would like to work with you
* Promote others - "do ut des" - I give, so that you may give
Work to a technically good level, always wanting to improve. Communicate well. Be positive and polite with your team. Be confident. These things will get you far.
1. Have a boss who doesn't take the credit for your work. If your direct manager is a decent person they'll put your work in front of leadership and attribute it to you. This has a very positive impact on your career.
2. Change job 'often', where often is a cadence that doesn't make it look like you're running away from things. Your best opportunity for self-promotion that has a high impact on your career is in a job interview.
However, I'll add a third insight - try to define success in a way that means you're feeling like you're moving upwards even if it's not recognized externally. Taking pride in the work you do, improving your skills, volunteering for challenging projects, etc really helps you feel like you're progressing, and that really helps with #2 above.
And if none of that works just pretend HN karma is an important metric. It works for me.
It is not up to an employee to choose a boss. So really, the only solution to this issue is your number 2 statement -> change jobs often. This will get you away from a shitty boss, (and a good one). You have to get out from under a shitty boss. That is the only solution.
So really, your number 1 should be: Never work for a shitty boss. Transfer laterally or find a new job if you thing your shitty boss is going to be your shitty boss for more than 1 to 1.5 years.
If you can't get out from under a shitty boss because you must stay in a same location and there are no other job opportunities, or you have a job so well-paying that you will never get a high-income job like this and you have high-income requirements like private schools for your kids, then you just have to eat the shit and pretend you like it. Get your enjoyment outside of work.
- World class at what you do
- Humble
- Helpful
- Someone with a reputation for solving problems, not causing more.
The rest works itself out.
Advice to the contrary either comes from McKinsey consultants or Tim Ferris-level grifters.
I do it by engaging with colleagues in the following way:
“You need help? Of course I’ll help you with that.”
“Yes, I helped Carl with that thing”.
“Carl and I build this thing, it was his idea, I did x”
“Yo Carl, I like working with you. I have this idea, can you help me?”
“No, I don’t have time to help you with the same thing that I helped Carl with. I am working on x right now, maybe later”.
Also seeking advice from colleagues is a pretty low key way of self promoting. You are showing that you are working on stuff.
So be generous and at the same time set boundaries so people won’t take advantage of you. I would err on the generous side, my experience is people seldom take advantage.
The result is that I often use second-person pronouns to take credit for work I did alone. Once I got called out on it during a job interview, and I had to clarify that no, in fact, I alone was responsible for implementing this great feature I just got through telling you about. The 'we' was a figure of speech I used because I don't want to sound like a pompous ass who takes credit for all the work, even if I deserve credit for all the work, because I did all the work.
Simply using the right pronouns can be a subtle yet effective signal for the purposes of self-promotion.
S = Sharing your work
H = Hone in what you are working on
A = Ask clarifying questions and get early feedback
R = Read what others in industry are doing and try to implement if it relates to your work as PoC.
E = Engage with others .. learn from their experiences and contribute / give back
- Highlight what your other team members did and how you were there (helping, helped, gratitude).
- Try to highlight things that usually gets ignored. For instance, the DevOps that writes awesome documentation or the front-end developer hacked to get around some design quirks.
This is a long-tail activity. Be the person to bring their good work out to others. You don't have to be talking or "marketing" around but this is a silent but extremely powerful weapon. Of course, people will start to notice you and will definitely want to know what you do. By then, you won't need to.
My advice, in the context of large organization (i.e. more than 50-100 engineers):
1. regularly discuss about expectations for next level/grade with your manager. Number one mistake I see are people talking about this 2 weeks before the evaluation period. Do not wait for evaluation period.
2. make it easy for your manager: ask him the information he needs, ask him who needs to understand your accomplishment, etc. Again, do not wait for evaluation period to start those discussions.
3. In the long term (your whole career), good outcomes and getting better at your job matters. But in the short/mid term (within your current job), self promotion matters.
In a large organization, just doing good work is not enough, for the following reasons
1. your promotion will depend on people who are not intimate with your accomplishment anymore.
2. the definition of "good work" is very context dependent: depends on your org, depends on the time, etc. What does your company value ? E.g. in most companies, the closer you are to what the execs value, the easier it is to explain what you do. Money is the obvious one, but that's not the only one. In some organizations, doing something with no business impact but very technically challenging can be rewarded. In other companies, this is not rewarded at all.
3. bonus and promotion budget: the more senior the role, the more it becomes a 0 sum game: for you to be promoted, somebody will not be. There is always a budget, people will fight for it.
4. as companies grow, there tends to be more standard processes on promotion. In practice, such systems will always reduce the variance. PG explained this well http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
The above is why in practice, you need your manager's help to understand what is valued and when. Good managers will know what is needed for you to be promoted to next level, and will help you building such a case.
my 2 cents, as a director-level manager, managing around 50-60 people and having been a manager for 5-6 years now, after ~ 12 years as IC in quite technical roles
If things do go sideways, the executive team does still appreciate properly managed retrospectives. You can both take responsibility for something and have it not be a shortcoming of you personally. "I could have suggested a change to process A to avoid this.", "I could have arranged a meeting on the topic earlier. Formalizing this as a step in the future will prevent this." People are constantly protecting their egos a that level and when an idea they signed up for doesn't go the way they want it helps to have someone who can unpack what occurred who doesn't go around looking for someone to blame. *Focus on process, not people* is something I carried with me from the nuclear industry. It helps to divorce egos from trying to address a valid problem with the org.
When the time comes for reviews, you will have everything structured.
2) More specifically, that work needs to have direct and obvious impact on the business. The quality of your code is less important than the problem it solves / revenue it produces.
3) If you have aspirations to lead, then learn to collaborate. Learn to lead.
4) Learn to listen. You'll learn more. You'll understand when and what to self-promote.
5) Related to 2, 3, and 4, learn what the business values. If you going to self-promote be certain to be in the business' sweet spot, else no one is going to care.
This may require a job change, even if you're happy with you salary and benefits and even tasks.
2. Make sure you understand the value structures of people arround you. In particular your boss and other decision makers, but also your peers and subordinates (if you have them). If possible, try to align your values and preferences with your surroundings. To an extent, don't come off as spineless. But it's better to make your disagreements known when it contradicts non-essential preferences.
If you contradict values that form part of the identity of some influential person around you, it may be almost impossible to ally with them.
3) For your work efforts, focus your output on activities that support the values of those you would like to have a good relationship with. Often that means make them look good. But it could apply to any number of other values, too. That could be working hours, code style/language, git patterns, keeping schedules/promises, etc.
4) Where your values do not overlap with others, don't expose them. Those could be political or technical or something else.
5) If some individual occupies some niche in the organization, be careful about acting as a competitor for their spot, unless you seriously want to challenge them for it. And expect to gain an enemy when you do.
6) Time your efforts wisely. Don't solve problems nobody cares about, unless they will blame you when they start to care about them. When people feel pain, though, being seen as the one that make the problems go away can be great self promotion.
This could involve putting in extra effort and/or if it can be resolved by leveraging some unique skills or talents that you may have.
Be mindful that this can make someone lose face. If those who would lose face are people you want to be allied with, it may be good to use some discretion.
7) If people take advantage, and exploit your output without providing proper credit, dont spend more energy on them than necessary. Focus your efforts to assist the goals of those who show appreciation in public or other ways that matter.
8) Volunteer to do presentations, internal knowledge sharing, coaching and similar work that allow you to appear as an authority, and take these activities extra seriously.
Do this both internally and externally if you can. External presentations may be the key to your next career step.
9) If you have side projects or things you've done in the past that you're proud of, just mention them in passing in situation where they're relevant, and without bragging. Reserve detailed elaboration to those who seem genuinely interested.
Let's say you contributed something to an open source project your team is using, it's much better that the team hears that from that person than from you.
However, if you DO have to bring such stuff up, make sure you hide your pride about it and focus on some other aspect (a compical element, the passion you have for some topic,etc). Beware, though, people are pretty good at identifying humblebragging.
Right question is ‘how do I get my contributions to be well understood.’
For that, you need to emphasize numbers. Every project, every task, every epic you ship has, at its heart, the goal to improve some metric in your business.
Do you understand what those metrics are? Do you understand why they are important to the business?
If the answer is “no”, then you’re doing things out of order. You can’t possibly hope to get others to understand your work if you yourself don’t understand it.
When you can say “I helped reduced latency by 237 ms”, that’s a good metric. Even better if you are curious enough to then connect it to the outcome - “which led to 17% longer sessions by users.”
When you master the numbers, then self-promotion becomes a by product of your work. E.g., at the team meeting “I understand our goal is to increase flip flops by 10%, is that right? Well, I think we can do it because when I was on that project with Team B last year we increased flib flabs by 12%.”
Summary: don’t self-promote, instead understand and communicate your impact on metrics.
- when someone complements you accept it and talk to them about your challenges in the project to make sure they don't think it was a breeze and you are proud of your work.
- present info on it to your group or "announce it" if it's something like a utility or internal tool.
- Talk at meetings rather than flipping through CNN, realize there are stupid questions however if you're trying to become better known.
- Don't be shy, but try to not be a braggart, confidence is sexy