Item — HN Reader

The promo process story hits home with me. I was trying to get promoted a few years back at my company. Over the previous 4 years, I built out a lot of systems, fixed critical bugs in our software stack, stayed late during crunch mode ensuring on time shipping, and volunteered to debug issues upstream issues impacting our software. Our team was customer facing so back-end bugs always surfaced in our product. I was a customer focused developer and fixer.

That being said, every time promo time rolled around, I had nothing to show for it. You needed metrics and some plan of how you were going to show your manager you were performing at the next level or it didn't count. The software that I worked on over a crunch week that made the news papers, doesn't count. My managers would put me on project that didn't lead to any favorable trajectory for promotions. Every project they ever suggested, which I took up is now deprecated or severely paired back to the point where it doesn't matter outside of my personal development.

Now, I'm 4 years in and starting from zero in terms of building my foundation for working on a project that is valuable enough to the company to reach a higher role. I'm still willing to do the hard work, spend the occasional late nights, get lost in my passion of working on customer solutions, and try to have an impact. My question now is whether it makes sense to build for my company or build for myself?

3 comments

Sounds like you needed a brag doc. You are the only one that can remember everything you did, so write it down and hand it to your manager so they can remember too.

https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/

Interesting I do exactly that to keep track and have something in hand on a rainy day where the motivation tanked.

I usually keep it analog though because a ruby piece of paper that fills over time is more tangible than a doc. But i guess that is personal preference ;)

This is a great idea, thanks for sharing.

My advice is talk to your manager about how disappointed you are. If you need metrics and a plan - work with him on how to get that, I'm sure they'll be happy to help. Alternatively it could be that you are doing great work but your manager didn't notice - so you should be telling him what you're up to. It could be that your manager isn't wise enough to realize how valuable you are so you should let others try to do the heavy lifting and fail. It could be that there you're just working too hard so you should be going home earlier and work on spending time learning the skills for your next job.

Another challenge along the previous 4 years was leadership turnover. In the last 4 years, I've had 4 managers. No one every really lasted more than a year. My most recent manager quit to start a stealth startup around the time I switched teams. He's a great person and a great manager, but he's on to bigger and better things. I've only been on my new team for a few months and my new team is great, but I think you final sentence is really where my sentiment is right now.

What about the third option of building it for a different company?

That's a great idea and also a potentially viable possibility.