I can build this skills as you said, true, but in my position now it would be impossible to get a promotion as the available spot has been taken already.
Nope. Silence is always less noticeable than noise.
Evil prevails when good men do nothing. Also, nonsense fluff prevails when good work isn't spoken of.
You have a professional duty to make sure nonsense is crowded out by important information. No one is going to do that for you.
Follow the rule of three...tell people what you are going to do and why it is important. Tell people what you are doing. Tell people what you've done. And not just anybody; decision makers.
It is no one else's job to tell people who influence your life of your good works.
No one has time to dig through everything you might have done to hold up the shining examples of your work. And now you have someone above you that might actually be interested in seeing it kept buried so it is even more critical that you do that interpersonal information transfer yourself.
You are a business, and like a business there is no worth in a product that the people who are in a position to buy don't know about. You're going to have to market and sell your value to the people that are buying. All of the time. Make it a habit. Your co-workers are competitors...don't expect them to sell your product for you. (though, keep in mind, part of your value-add is cooperating in your value-add chain so don't take this analogy too far).
Honestly, this is stuff that took me way too long to learn. They should teach it in engineering school. Hell, they should teach it in secondary school, for that matter, since there is really no one who is not running a business even if it is a business of one.
over promising and under delivering isn't a sustainable model
under promising too much and you won't get the chance to deliver
there's a sweet spot somewhere in there, which can be sometimes tricky to find
An interesting corollary: Find out what's bothering decision makers. What're their annual or quarterly (or whatever) goals? If you know what those are - not only can you say "Hey, by the way, I did what I'm being paid to do, but, by the way, it helps to address that thing that's been bugging you."
Often, when you do good work and are good at what you do, it actually looks like your job is easy, even when you are busting your ass to get results!
Some of the best engineers I remember working with did the over-communicating stuff you advise and I remember it was always very clear what they were working on versus other people. They also had a knack for communicating the work in the simplest terms for everyone to understand.
In short: “I did it all myself” is always a lie. It could only ever be true if babes were left in woods since the time of birth to fend for themselves, and even then, debatable.
Since you’re already in the position where you seem to lead the technical efforts of the team, where would you like to go from there?
Unfortunately that's not true. If "shitty code that works" requires three days to be understood in order to make a small change that became a delivery issue and three days in a problem that can be solved in one hour are $$ that somebody is paying. In addition "shitty code that works" most of the time has scalability and performance issues sooner or later you need to address if you don't want it to implode.
> where would you like to go from there?
I can also keep staying in this position, I just don't like to have a manager that I'm not even proud of. And, by the way, I'd like to be in a position where decision making is more stronger also in a business perspective. There are a lot of ridiculous choices that some people makes that are not very effective in some ways let alone make data driven choices. As the organisations today claims to be "agile", most of the time they're not at all. They just use a new word but act as old school (long feedback-loop just to give you an example)
People outside your team won't understand your reasoning. They'll see code working one day and a random failure a long time after that, which might or might not be related to the previously working code. They're just like my cat.
If you want to act for "shitty code", act before it's in production. Afterwards it's very hard to dislodge. And even harder to pinpoint the blame, as the author will definitely protect his back, ethically or not.
I'd take the experience as a lesson in human interactions :)
I think you might be missing their point. From the perspective of a programmer, yes, these things are true. Code SHOULD be Good and Right™, and that is very easy to see and grok from a programmer's standpoint. But to a manager? These things usually have to be stated explicitly, and that isn't entirely the manager's fault. It is easy and pervasive in the industry to write crappy code that works for a variety of reasons (time constraints, incompetence, poor decisions from on high, etc...). Even the best managers have some degree of "out of sight, out of mind" because they rightly delegate the responsibility of making sure the code works AND minimizes tech debt to the developer. It doesn't become apparent to them (and by proxy, the business) that the code was poorly written until the shit hits the fan.
Also, it is unfortunate that you have to leave that job. In my experience in the industry, being able to go back and fix tech debt like you are describing is very uncommon.
I side with you on this because of something I see often: At the end of the day what the CIO (a purchasing manager or the budget signer) asks about is who killed the fire for the day. When you are the good fireman, no one wonders about the quality of hose you used ..
Now, when's the last time you went out of your way to discover if and how someone screwed up?
The difference is just how people are wired. We are all kind of dumb.
As a fun exercise, track down someone responsible for having made your life better today, find out exactly how they did it and give them a piece of your mind about it.
Putting it into practice has been tough, but early results have been good. I'm less likely to get angry, and while I still am not necessarily getting what I want all the time, I feel like I'm getting more clarity and direct communication around why not.
The value you create doesn't talk about you except to people who know you're the one who created it.