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At my previous company, I worked on high impact, very low visibility work. I was working directly with operations teams around the world in order to enable feat

• divbzero 6y ago
  I sympathize with situations like this. If anyone reading is in a similar boat, asking for positive written feedback from the teams you work with and including that in your performance review is one way to get recognized for high impact low visibility work. It sucks that you have to go out of your way to gain recognition and it won’t always work but that can be how it is in large companies.
  • dasil003 6y ago
    This is good advice, I'll add one more thing: make sure your manager values what you are doing. If they do not then you are headed for trouble regardless. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that your manager relationship is probably the single most important factor to optimize for in any job. If you don't have mutual trust and respect it will lead to distortions, and in the worst cases can create long-term psychological corruption leaving one cynical and unable to trust their own better instincts.
    • idiocrat 6y ago
      Yes, and you should always work the manager's manager. This is a win-win for everybody in the line.
      • cpach 6y ago
        How do you mean? Feel free to expand on this advice :)
        • PakG1 6y ago
          Figure out ways to make the person two levels above you to also understand and appreciate what you do.
          • cutemonster 6y ago
            What are ways to do that? What comes to my mind is taking with him/her at the coffee machine but I guess that's not what you'd think of / suggest
            • PakG1 6y ago
              Hahaha, of course, if I really knew the answer to that, I'm sure I'd be doing much better than I am. :D But I've sometimes had success with the following: - get attached to high-visibility problems or initiatives, which admittedly also have higher risk in making you look bad - write up really good reports/proposals on what you're doing and why it's important; good writeups sometimes get passed around and shown as example to the rest of the company; really good writing skills are underappreciated by many technical people - do presentations about your work, knock it out of the park when someone important is in the room These opportunities are like waves for surfers. Surfers spend a lot of time just waiting for the right wave, but when the wave finally comes, the surfer better be ready. It's like the stories of Apple employees being ready with a summary if Steve Jobs bumped into them in the elevator and asked them what they're working on. Gotta be ready.
  • jaggederest 6y ago
    I go maybe a step further: I send out project-specific surveys that have things like impact metrics (How significant has the impact of Project X been, in terms of dollars, hours of effort, or deals won), classic NPS type questions (If a similar situation arose in the future, how likely would you be to reach out to me/my team for help?), and questions that dive into how the project went, how it was organized, and more. I really should turn that into a business now that I think about it.
    • licebmi__at__ 6y ago
      I worked in a company where we had this kind of surveys, but there was a catch; every feedback that was not excellent, was considered bad performance. So yeah, not so great place.
      • jaggederest 6y ago
        Oof yeah I always make sure mine capture reality and are genuinely anonymous to the degree I can. Mandatory positive feedback is super gross as a modus operandi
• Aperocky 6y ago
  That's why there should not be a hard metric set by people who don't even know how to code. Performance review should be conducted by people who have a direct understanding of what is being done, and if that's impossible, at least people with a capacity to understand what is being done.
  • yibg 6y ago
    The other side of the argument is often how do you keep things objective and consistent across the company, especially when it’s a large company. How do you make sure a “senior engineer” on one team is reviewed on the same criteria as someone on a completely different team.
    • maxerickson 6y ago
      If they aren't doing the same work, you can't make sure the same criteria are used.
    • nicoburns 6y ago
      That's not much of an argument when the supposedly "objective" measurements aren't measuring what's truly important anyway. I think the best you can do is probably to moderate the managers assessment with "360" feedback from everyone an emplotee works with, and similar feedback on the manager themselves.
    • Aperocky 6y ago
      Where I work we have very broad criteria that applies to almost everyone in the same occupation. Those are not negotiable but measurable - when we apply only tiny bits of subjective understanding
    • quanticle 6y ago
      Why should a senior engineer on one team be reviewed along the same criteria as a senior engineer on another team? Do you judge a kernel developer the same way you'd judge a Javascript expert? Fundamentally, it comes down to whether the person is helping their team accomplish its goals. And the best way to do that is to ask the team, rather than try to cast about for some kind of nonexistent "objective" value metric that allows you to rank every single developer in your organization.
• ditonal 6y ago
  One of the reasons I find your story relevant is that advice-pieces like the OP kind of assume a ton of factors are in place that are actually often largely out of your control. It kind of paints this clear career trajectory path for engineers when I think the real world is infinitely more chaotic and random. For one thing, just the existence of titles like Staff Engineer seems to have exploded in the last 5 years or so, at least from my perspective. My first few jobs out of school, it seemed like the progression was Junior, quickly to just "Software Engineer", eventually to Senior, and then nowhere particular, maybe management. I guess everyone in the industry can't help but steal Google's structure so these new levels of Staff, Senior Staff, Principal seem to have grown in popularity, but I think it's a more recent idea than not. I'm glad that standardized IC tracks are growing but it's hardly a given and the first factor is that your company offers them in the first place. Still, it's incredibly unstandardized. Having insight into both companies, I know a place like Twitter, Staff Engineer is handed out more lightly than a place like Google and can be more reflective of political prowess than engineering impact. A dynamic I've seen over and over again is orgs expect more senior engineers to work on more senior stuff but inevitably there is a massive amount of work that's individually low impact but collectively high impact to be done. In a dream world you'd figure out ways to automate it but that's not always feasible. So often times there are political wars fought over access to high impact projects which are perceived as necessary for promotion, while core, critical work that's less sexy but critical to good product gets left undone. If you want to know why a lot of tech companies that pay engineers massive amounts can launch shiny new things with ease but struggle with the basics, look no further. One of Google's approach to this problem is to create a massively complicated ladder system of engineers, where you have employees that would be labeled Software Engineers at any other company by nature of their job responsibilities, but at Google are called something else and are specifically boxed out of more desirable projects by nature of their non-SWE title. And of course the contractor vs full-time distinction exists as well. Another dynamic that can happen is that you have huge engineering impact but your company's product strategy fails so its all for nought. You can impact your company's chance of success but ultimately a company works in a given industry on certain problems and if for whatever reason the company's big picture strategy fails then that has a high chance of undermining and overshadowing your individual impact. Or you were born in the wrong country or run into major health issues that block access to high impact work. Overall, I just find advice like "work on high impact stuff, don't snack" to be oversimplified to the point of pandering when, there's so many variables outside the scope of your control as to whether you'll even get access to the opportunity to do high impact work in the first place. And while, of course there's almost certainly a correlation between strong engineering IC career trajectory and skill, work ethic, and good career decisions, there's also undoubtedly a massive amount of all sorts of bias that make me skeptical of a cookbook on how to get there.
• antipaul 6y ago
  What was your manager doing all this time?
• sizzle 6y ago
  Why are developers being managed by non technical saavy managers? This sounds like a red flag.
  • PakG1 6y ago
    Probably because the organization doesn't have a great technical culture. It is a red flag, but understanding that it's not an easy problem to solve is helpful. It's not easy to find great technical managers, especially in non-technical organizations. Look at how many non-technical organizations around the world spend millions of dollars on software projects that eventually get written off as failures. It's appalling, especially given that we definitely have the knowledge on how to make good software already. Skills in managing technical initiatives and teams are sorely underappreciated, even by many technical people who actually do the work. Non-technical managers can be great too, when they know their limitations and know the skills of their team. It is possible to have a good non-technical manager managing technical people.
• hiimtroymclure 6y ago
  this hits home. I worked on a team that wasn't high priority. I had issues getting our teams features prioritized cause every team had about 6-8 dependent teams in order to ship something and when I had these discussions to get our work on other teams backlog's, I was told they didn't have the bandwidth to do work for low priority teams. I needed my bosses help getting my teams work prioritized on the global roadmap. He informed that our team just wasn't high priority enough this quarter. Then fast forward too performance review he said I didn't do enough to get work prioritized. I quit 3 weeks later.
  • nicoburns 6y ago
    If the work is that low priority, it makes you wonder why they bother having anyone doing it at all!
• ta1234567890 6y ago
  It's through cases like this that you realize that what actually matters to the world is whatever gets the most attention. If you are doing amazing work that benefits hundreds, thousands or even millions of people, but nobody is paying attention, then it will be really hard to justify it. Conversely, shallow stuff that might only benefit a few but gets tons of attention, is easy to justify and keep going.
  • PlasticTank 6y ago
    Very true, it goes a long way to explaining the current state of news and politics.
  • ensiferum 6y ago
    Unfortunately this is true also in my opinion. Two engineers. Engineer A working on the new shiny prototype stuff that is riddled with bugs and errors and never goes to production but gets to demo it to the upper management. Engineer B grinding away on the old "legacy"system fixing bugs adding some new small features generally keeping things going. Who do you expect will be getting the bigger RSU package? Unfortunately it seems that often the key factor is indeed visibility.
    • brlewis 6y ago
      Do what you're paid for. If your compensation is based on visibility, then communicating the importance of your work is as important as doing it. If your company will pay you more if you spend less time working and more time communicating about your work, then you should make that adjustment.
      • arbitrary_name 6y ago
        This is a great comment. If you don't advocate for the work you do, or yourself, you're making it harder for EVERYONE. Humbleness is fine, but laboring in the shadows on critical stuff makes it harder to allocate resources to where they are best directed (like you and the work you do!).
  • deleted 6y ago
• 908B64B197 6y ago
  Let me guess: Non-Technical manager (as in, couldn't FizzBuzz)? If so, that's the first takeaway here: A non-technical manager is a red flag that should not be ignored.
  • I_AM_A_SMURF 6y ago
    As long as the manager is not the one making technical decision, then there's nothing wrong with a non-technical manager. That's why you need IC tracks with Principal and above engineers, so that the person that _knows_ stuff is in charge of technical decision and the manager can be in charge of people problems / communications / strategy / scheduling, none of which strong technical people are particularly known to be good at. Think about this, what good does having a SVP of a big company be an engineer that hasn't coded a line of code in 20+ years? These people probably don't even remember what it means to be a programmer. I would much rather have a manager that is good at being a manager and doesn't know anything about coding, rather than a mediocre manager that also knows coding but they are not in the loop and think they knows better than me.
  • reificator 6y ago
    I have had non technical managers that delegated and trusted their team, and I have had "technical" managers that hadn't learned new skills since the 90s. Between those two: I'll take the non skilled every time.
    • noisy_boy 6y ago
      Having dealt with micro-managing/overly-exacting technical managers, me too.
  • jeffbee 6y ago
    It really depends on the organization. I've been in places where the job of the manager really is to just "manage": make sure everyone has a desk and a computer and takes their vacation sometimes but not too much and so forth. Performance was based on peer review, work was planned from the bottom up. Obviously a non-technical manager is fine in this role and a technical person would be wasted.
• threatripper 6y ago
  Whatever happens - it happens by design. Your work wasn't quite as important as you believed it to be. Managers have a very good feeling on where to invest and where to divest their personal energy. Either your area or the whole company wasn't set up for success, so they divested while you hung on to a lost cause. It's not your fault but that doesn't matter because you took the blame. Better pay more attention to what's going on around you next time and don't expect your boss to do the important job for you.
• katrotz 6y ago
  One of the priceless conclusions I've reached during my career is that software engineering is not only about developing software, but also about self-marketing the importance of it