Surfacing Your Accomplishments

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>> Francesca Sadikin: Preparing for Promotions. So here's another prompt, is it enough to just work hard and deliver good quality code if you want to climb up the career ladder? No, yes [LAUGH] okay.
>> Speaker 1: [INAUDIBLE] to notice.
>> Francesca Sadikin: Exactly, exactly.
>> Speaker 2: Advocate for yourself.
>> Francesca Sadikin: Advocate for yourself, exactly. So it's interesting cuz some people really know that you have to have to advocate for yourself.

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And others maybe culturally we just think we don't need to talk about it too much, and I definitely grew up in a culture like that, but you guys are right. Look at it this way, your managers and leadership are busy, right? They actually appreciate any visibility you give them into your work and its impacts.

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You maybe think, all right, my manager needs to hear about my accomplishments, but shouldn't that come from others? While it's wonderful that peers acknowledge your work, relying solely on them is very risky, because people are busy. And if you're not advocating for yourself, your contributions might go unnoticed, and silence can easily be mistaken for inactivity, which is not a narrative you wanna build.

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At the end of the day promotions, despite all of these processes and paperwork you probably have to fill out, it is still a subjective decision made by people and that decision depends on trust. Can they trust you to take on more responsibility? If they're unaware of your impact and achievements, they cannot confidently entrust you with more challenges and more responsibilities.

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So remember, owning your narrative is not about self-promotion, it's not arrogance, it's about creating clarity and trust. Your work has value, and it's important that those in leadership understand and appreciate your contributions. So how do you actually do that? What I like to do is create a brag doc.

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So this is a personal document that you are hosting somewhere where you start accumulating all of your work. And most importantly if you have metrics of some kind to show the impact of that work, that would be even better. I like to use the situation-behavior-impact format to essentially outline what happened, what my actions were, and then the results of that action.

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Bonus point, this is probably the format you need to talk about in behavioral interviews. It's probably what you paste into the promotion dockets as well, and you probably can use a shortened version of it in your resume. So think of it as like writing it once use it in four different places, create regular communication loops.

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So, just like we talked about before with the feedback loops that you want to get, you also wanna be sharing all of the successes that you've been doing, right? If you receive positive feedback from anyone you're working with, ask them to put it in writing, send it to you.

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Take a screenshot, put it in your brag doc, and then send it over to your manager. You wanna be continuously sending that kind of information back to your manager. And lastly, understand the promotion and rewards process before you actually want that promotion. So maybe a year, a year and a half beforehand.

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You wanna start having conversations with your manager and be like I'm trying to go for that, where do you think I am compared to what I'm supposed to be. And so now you have that time frame to continuously focus on those things and checking with your manager whether you're on track.

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So that when it's time for promotions you're not gonna be as surprised about whether you're gonna get it or not.
>> Francesca Sadikin: So despite all of the pros of surfacing your accomplishments, people still have hesitations, right? And so hesitations, it still feels really arrogant. Or this work was really done as a team, I'm not really sure how to extract my own impact when we did it as a team.

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Or I'm not really sure this is actually an accomplishment at all. And I'm not sure if anyone's actually doing this because usually it's done behind closed doors, I swear to you, everybody is doing this. So, to learn a little bit more about overcoming some of these hesitations, I recommend these two books, if you wanna go into it.

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How women rise is specific for women, the cultural norms that we were raised with, and what we need to overcome. They're different from what men traditionally experience. So if you're a guy, I recommend what got you here won't get you there.
>> Francesca Sadikin: So we're coming up on our preparation takeaways, where we're wrapping up the preparation section.

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So some things to keep in mind, right? To deliver work efficiently and understand the code base, I really recommend, again, that shadowing and pair programming experience to just help you deliver that much faster. Remember that quality code is actually about making code maintainable and easy to change. Use tests to understand systems and help yourself work safely and embrace test driven development, even if your company doesn't really care about it.

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I actually think it's really useful for you individually as a software engineer. It's important to have a clear debugging process and then to help you execute tasks more effectively. Think about gathering more information, improving your estimation skills, and changing the way you start working on tasks. And make sure to overcommunicate.

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And lastly, be proactive in asking for help and continue to surface your achievements to help you continue growing.