> Yeah. I suspect I'm like most engineers in this regard: staying quiet and focusing on work that "speaks for itself" is my default mode of thinking and working

> Yeah. I suspect I'm like most engineers in this regard: staying quiet and focusing on work that "speaks for itself" is my default mode of thinking and working. It is a natural tendency for a lot of people. I know I tend to do it because I don’t like when my work has flaws, so I spend way too much time making sure everything is perfect before I dare showing something to others. It’s still something to overcome because being quiet in one’s corner is counter-productive in the long run. > If you come up with a clever solution, you need to promote it. You don't have to "brag" but you do need to tell people that you e.g. came up with an optimization that makes the thing go faster and you probably need to show your manager a graph demonstrating the thing you did. Exactly! It makes the manager happy because they feel they understood something and it makes you happy because you feel like the value you bring is recognised. > If you think this is dumb, I don't blame you, but that is how things work. It’s not dumb, it’s adapting to one’s environment. It’s hubris to think that all the other people around have the same priorities as you. They have other interests, other skills, other objectives, and they also have only 24 hours each day. When you spend time to engineer something, they don’t have the skills or the time to study it in detail, therefore they cannot grasp all the cleverness in it on their own. That’s not because managers are stupid or MBAs or something. The same is true in a team of engineers. A single person is not able to keep track of everything their colleagues do. So the quiet worker doing their thing in their corner is also missing out. It’s just that they have other things to do. So if you want them to know how clever the thing you did is, just tell them. People respond quite well if you show them something interesting (though, as you say, bragging is bad and is usually seen as a problem, not a sign of brilliance). The key is to talk about the thing and how it solves whatever complicated problem was limiting, not about how bright you are for coming up with such a solution. It makes for interesting conversations as well, because the other people also have clever ideas every now and then, and that way you can hear about them. Because yourself are not necessarily aware of how brilliant your colleagues are if they never talk about what they do. > If you want to fight this reality to some small extent, you can work hard to recognize your coworkers' achievements and clever solutions and promote them by word of mouth, to your manager, etc. If everybody did this then people wouldn't need to self-promote so much. Yes! Another consequence is that this way there is more communication and more cross-pollination, and everyone wins.