Being visible | Hacker News Reader

Being visible

lethain.com

65 pointsabsolute10012 comments

Being promoted to Staff Engineer levels and above has to be around the impact you're working on and producing visibility around it - where are we heading, can we feel the confidence we need when you lead it, how others around you feel about it. Will Larson wrote a post I believe all software engineers should read: "Find the right mix of activities that leverage your strengths, aren’t already overburdened with volume, and feel authentic to you. If you’ve never done much communication of your work, it may feel awkward to self-promote your work. You never want to wholly lose that sense of awkwardness–restraint helps–but you will have to get comfortable with some of it."

> If you’ve never done much communication of your work, it may feel awkward to self-promote your work.

Doing the work is half the challenge. Advertising the work is the rest. Figuring out how to do that authentically is an exercise for the reader.

Very important & underappreciated skill. Anyone who wants to climb needs to be part politician.

I once saw someone's Senior Manager promotion announcement/congrats from the department VP include the justification "I see you on a lot of e-mails" and little else. The guy was by all appearances merely noisy and feckless, but his career ramped up faster than did mine..so I guess - ultimately - not so feckless after all. Just min-maxing on the skills that resulted in advancement, and delegating the technical functions to others under and around him.

The same VP once told me over coffee, "[your location] is out of sight, out of mind-- and I mean that as a compliment." I've since managed to match my noisy colleague's career level, but first I had to learn to put on my public face and be visible in my work.

It's all so tiresome.

yes. a more accurate terminology would be "start being a politician".

a shift I feel has occurred in the last 10y in the tech industry is that engineers themselves now are pulled into the political games if they want to continue their path beyond senior engineer roles. of course they aren't compelled to play politics. they could simply do their work well, but then they are likely to stay right where they are unless their manager take the political fight for them. (and often do, in order to keep them).

being visible isn't enough. embellishing your visibility is needed since that's exactly what the others have been doing.

the tech space is becoming terribly sad, with a growing portion of energy expenditure spent outside engineering work.

Is the work “writing code” or is it “solving problems for the business”? If it’s the latter, communicating with others in the organization and advocating for change in some direction (aka “politics”) is part of the work.

Communicating and advocating change isn't politics. That's, as you say, part of the work. It happens all the time in healthy environments, and at all levels.

Politics is the art of communication and other tactic and strategies to gain (or influence those who have) power and control. Spending time embellishing accomplishments or simply making sure our own contributions get better visibility in order to access higher level of seniority is a common political tactic. No difference in merit or abilities or result, but effort to navigate and manipulate perceptions to get endorsement.

I could only deplore my entire life that national/state affairs are over taken by political moves rather than focus on change.It may be what attracted me to tech initially, as it seemed pretty immune to politics (it works or it doesn't). Yet, to my astonishment, politics is prevalent now, and it is even surprisingly difficult to not get objections when I dare to share that observation. At least thank you for sparing me whataboutism fallacious counter arguments.

TL-DR: communication isn't limited to being political.

> the tech space is becoming terribly sad, with a growing portion of energy expenditure spent outside engineering work.

But this is not inevitable. You can work for a small/medium sized company where the objective is to get things done. Aim at a project where the realization of the product is its own reward, where you learn a lot, where you appreciate your colleagues, where the life/work balance is sane and where the money allows you to live well and prepare for your retirement.

Once you get that, who cares about your title?

Personally I don't care about titles.It isn't about title the article or my remark is about though, it's about career progression. I'm with you smaller size companies tend to provide a better environment where politics is kept very low. The article talks about how to get past a certain point by being more visible. I stick to that context and point out this is more about playing politics. If the article suggested that to get past senior level one option is to join a smaller company, sure, i would have added that job titles are anyway irrelevant and what's important is growth along with well being.

> they could simply do their work well, but then they are likely to stay right where they are

What's wrong with that? Senior SDE is a great job; one of the best jobs humanity has ever come up with.

What is a "staff-plus" role?

Non-management leadership roles at the level beyond the “Senior” title. Usually involves cross-team strategy planning and requires 5-10 years of experience.

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