Get your work recognized: write a brag document (2019)

This is exactly how contract work is done. If you’re doing this as a full time employee you’re underpaid (assuming it’s for your employer - doing it for yourself is a great idea!)

I'm low tech and prefer to use a notecard with a grid on it, the squares of which bear enough space for only a word or two maximum, but you can just as easily use a spreadsheet or something fancier.

It makes putting together a better summary at the end of your day a lot easier, and it also helps with future forays into time estimation since you have a clearer picture of how long things take.

It also helps show when it's time to go take a walk.

have you worked at one of the megacorps you're talking about?

everyone has a list, because their manager gets them to write one, and it's very possible for managers to evaluate them because that is their job and they are largely reviewing their direct reports while getting bollocked by their peer managers.

They're not the problem they're a consequence of the problems.

> Because you need to “brag” to get rewarded, everyone ambitious has a list. And each list is nearly impossible for middle managers to evaluate.

This will be read mostly by your manager not a middle manager. It's up to your manager then to represent your accomplishments to middle managers and above. Good thorough middle managers will still be able to assess them though.

> Another person might redo some docs. Someone may create a design system version. Lots of token achievements, but not real work.

Competent managers can distinguish between those, if you don't have competent managers that's the problem, not the "brag doc".

> Real work should stand on its own and competent managers should be able to identify it. Mediocre managers rely on lists, so then people start showing up to work and making lists.

No because even competent managers have often a wide span at large companies and cannot be involved in the day to day details for all the work their team does and things can fall through the cracks. This would only be solvable by having first line managers have less reports or less manager overhead so they can be immersed in their team's work. I have done both, but at large companies is often not possible to be immersed in the work of all of your reports, no matter how competent you are. As mentioned in the article, even you often forget what you have done last week.

Learning to communicate impact is difficult, but it's a really good skill to have. Do these doc changes/engineering problems help reduce KTLO? Does it reduce on-call toil? Is it going to bring security patches? Is it going to make the system more efficient and save money? Are these frequently asked features? Do you have other people (preferably seniors) who can vouch in favour of these changes? All these things are measurable and can be communicated as impact.

There are instances where a change has 0 impact and it's still nice to have, for example, fixing a typo in the internal docs. But these changes are usually very easy to do (take less than 5 minutes), and it won't affect your other tasks. On the other hand, spending several days fixing typos everywhere may seem like a great idea, but if nobody cares about them and it does not move any needles, then you are just wasting the company's time and money. The effort you put in these no-impact changes should be a defining factor for prioritization.

They’re just a data structure… and a useful one at that… competent managers work in diverse ways. Schedules are made up of lists of information, do 10x managers not use schedules?

Giant red flag.

If you don't keep this document constantly updated on a daily basis, you will quickly forget what you did and when, and then you won't have a document for any of your achievements.

You need to show this document to your manager and discuss each item on the list during your weekly 1-on-1 meetings.

Failure to do so is pretty much guaranteed to keep you from being promoted. Failure to be promoted is pretty much guaranteed to get you pushed out the door.

The U.S. Military has a concept of "too much time in grade", a.k.a., "up or out". The big companies have a similar process -- if you're not moving up the ladder fast enough in comparison to all the other people at your level, then you need to leave.

My biggest problem is recognizing when I've done anything worthy of writing down as an achievement.

Doesn't need to be embellished.

If you think you are able to do that in your company without a prioritised retrospective process, I would be very curious to know how that happens.

(From my experience of working in 10+ organisations, people who think so usually are lying to themselves that they are recognising and valuing great work. They are (without exception, in my experience) running a very political organisation. But I would love to be proved wrong.)

I am biased as a manager, but, for context, I was a senior IC for a long time before management though. I also transitioned first being a TL/manager "deeply aware" (reviewing most PRs, coding large parts myself, etc) and then eventually as a more traditional manager.

Sometimes management can be unnecessary or incompetent, but also you're excluding the possibility of companies trying to find a reasonable organizational balance of management costs. A manager that is deeply aware or involved, is also a manager that cannot manage more than maybe 5-6 people. If you want a manager to manage more people and focus in coaching, cross-team dependencies, unclogging stuck projects, roadmap building, etc; you rarely can have a manager doing IC work still and that means they cannot be involved in every PR or conversation their team is involved. If you give autonomy to the team members to make decisions and progress, by definition you won't be involved nor "deeply aware" all the time. Your 1:1s are an opportunity to address this divergence and a brag document helps feed your 1:1 with your manager to bring them up to date.

I have no doubt that the LinkedIn addicts and self-help book cultists will swoop down to insist that this advice applies to all companies. But really, it is most heavily tilted toward tech giants and large enterprises.