NO PROMOTION! Getting Visibility As A Software Engineer

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what is up it is Saturday night this is the second video for the night and obviously I'm not commuting because I'm sitting here in the home office uh I went to CrossFit this morning but I drove with my wife and I jokingly said to her so what are we vlogging today and she said why are you driving separately from me and I said no that was the joke like you're going to be in the Vlog what are you what are we vlogging she like no but it's funny because I bought two of these mics so if there's ever a day where she's up for it we'll get her on to code commute but it's G to be a it's gonna be a struggle I'm gonna answer a question that came in from LinkedIn and this one's going to be about visibility I think it's a

I think it's a good question this is still something that I am navigating so I'm GNA preface this entire conversation with the fact that like some of the other things I talk about I feel much more comfortable um I I don't I never really like saying like hey I'm an expert on this but I might have a lot of lived experiences where I can say hey here's a handful of different things that I've lived through some different perspectives on it that I've had and I'm happy to share and this time it's going to be a little bit more about um some of my experiences some perspective but I don't even feel like I'm at a point where I have this solved and then I can like educate people on it so that's the the framing for this but we're going to be talking about visibility

with respect to performance at work and what that looks like uh with regards to Promotions and things like that so I think it's a great question I wanted to say thanks uh to the user for submitting it um this was on LinkedIn so uh they reached out to me profile should be open so that's Nick centino on LinkedIn or look for Dev leader on social media and if you just want questions answered and you don't care if they're private um you know just a general question just leave them in the comments below the video Happy to go answer that for you um okay I think let's dive into it so a little bit of context about this individual um just so you know where they're coming from right so software engineer uh three years full stack uh at a at a big company in Canada

so it's not like a startup or anything it's a pretty large size company it doesn't matter what company it is um some visibility challenges they've had are they a midsize he works on a midsize team with limited interaction with leadership um so like the sort of the person that's at the head of their their suborganization um decision makers at promotion Roundtable don't know me okay an limited in office presence which is a very that's not even something that I was thinking of but I think that this is a a good one to bring up um they're mentioning that they have had uh five this says Comm commendations but maybe that I don't know if that's a word or I don't know it recommendations let's I'm just going to assume recommendations from managers peers for collaboration awesome so they're they're a good sort of team player

um consistently reviewed as operating at the next level top contributor in their current project so like and I have no reason to doubt this person I don't know them um but like I think that that's fair that we can believe that so there is just some kind of framing at least for this individual right um so the fact that they're asking me this if you like this might be something where you kind of relate to that um I've had challenges around visibility as well which is what I'll be discussing right so um this person said in your video on increasing your luck surface area you mentioned your dislike for visibility as a career metric and the tradeoffs IT entails actually that was right at the end of the video too so thanks for watching right to the end but um I said often at the

cost of engineering efforts and he said this deeply resonated with me as someone who's been told I'm performing at the next level but has missed promotions seemingly due to a lack of visibility okay so hopefully that's enough framing um and I'm going to try to get into some of these details so uh the context that I have in my career again if you're kind of new here or need a reminder I worked at a startup company that grew into a um a pretty successful business uh and got to see that kind of transform from like just a few people like a handful to um you know over the eight years to like you know hundreds of people so really cool to be part of that growth but I had the luxury of not ever having to worry about visibility visibility uh with respect to impact

and that's because um from the beginning I had a lot of autonomy given to me from uh the founder and the CEO the founder is the CTO but both the CTO and CEO you know a lot of trust and respect with me and I had a lot of trust and respect with them they gave me a lot of autonomy it's not like they just said like hey go do whatever you want but like like hey here's the direction we need you to go in and they they kind of gave me that room um so I always and like I could I didn't have any other responsibilities outside of work I could just keep working so I spent the first like8 years of my career just being able to like deliver value right like and high impact stuff because it was a you know it's very

small company at the beginning so I just had all of these opportunities to keep exercising this kind of stuff so the first eight years of my professional career after internships it honestly just felt like I never had to worry about this stuff I didn't have to think about it if that makes sense I it never crossed my mind that something like visibility would be a limiting factor at any point in my career right let me do good work and I will show you what I'm capable of that's kind of been the mindset that I've had because it's worked for me so if you tell me what needs to get done and you Empower me to do it and give me the room to do it I will deliver and I work really hard like it's it's like the kind of um like my work ethic

is one of the things that I'm very proud of and you know like I would love to be able to say to people like no one's going to outwork me kind of thing like I will put in I will grind um it's like I I take my content creation the same way right like I've done like over 400 YouTube videos in two years and this year's going to be ridiculous like I was doing like three YouTube videos a week I'm doing 15 YouTube videos a week right now between my two channels it's nuts um the point is like like when I get into something and you give me autonomy I will do good work that's how I operate so visibility has never been a challenge now with that said going to a much this is like how things really change for me when I went

to Microsoft so that was uh just under 5 years ago now obviously this is a completely different d damic not only did I go from being iners at a company that I was there like basically since the beginning to a company that I was working remote and obviously Microsoft is redonkulous big right like I I will never meet all of the people in my organization ever it's nuts it's huge um so with that said the opportunity for visibility like that's actually something that I just don't get for free now so to kind of focus on some of the things that this person brought up um like I want to make sure that I can talk about the Limited in office presence so I'm going to come back to that one a little bit later um the midsize team with limited interaction with leadership this might

be where I kind of um start my focus so the and as I talk this I'm going to be sharing my experiences from Microsoft and this isn't like at no point when I go to describe this is anything a knock on Microsoft I very much enjoy my time at Microsoft so this is me explaining things if it sounds like there's frustration coming through it's not directed at individuals it's not directed at Microsoft this is just like me kind of learning about how to exist in big Tech if that's making any sense so when I started at Microsoft um it was remote in Canada and then so I had a really supportive manager I had a really supportive skip level manager and then I ended up moving down to the US but my job was still basically remote I actually they moved me down and I

lived on the edge of Campus if I took a step across the street I was on the Microsoft campus which is kind of funny but my entire team was still like not in the office and it was locked down in the beginning anyway so I moved across the entire continent to Microsoft and then worked remote pretty funny um but had a very supportive manager very suppored skip level manager and then within a few months my manager moved over to another team and so he I feel like he set me up very well right he gave me the things that I need to work on um I had a good working relationship with my skip level manager kind of like here's the domain I'm responsible for and it it honestly kind of felt like the close to the situation I described at the startup obviously not

the same working relationship but it was like Hey like here's your Charter and like I trust that you're going to do a good job so you know you're going to be learning and ramping up he told me it was going to take me one full year to feel confident and he wasn't wrong so um so he set me off right go do good things and he ended up moving to a different team but this left a period of time I guess I don't know was it like just after a year in or something like that but this left a period of time where um I didn't have a direct manager and it meant that I would be kind of like reporting into my skip level which for me in theory I was kind of like hey that's maybe not such a bad thing like my

skip level is like he's great to work for um I actually still have interactions with them now across different teams which is really cool um but again like he was the same kind of uh situation for me right where it was like I felt like he had a a lot of trust in me he knew that I was like new to Microsoft so there's going to be stuff that I have to navigate but um he here's your Charter I know you know it go go deliver so in my head I was like maybe that's not so bad not like don't get me wrong I really liked working for my manager but maybe it's not so bad because I have a really supportive Skip and the reality is now I'm talking directly to someone who's a higher level so like maybe that's actually not bad um

so I just continued to work on the things that were asked of me right like here here's your here's your Charter go deliver and I was delivering and even with my manager being there it was like um receiving above Target so I was basically performing above expectations so that was good um and I just kind of continued to operate at that level and then I was given even more responsibility so I was given an entire second team and this team was given to me in a state and this isn't saying anything negative of the team um or even the previous manager but the previous manager was setting this team up to run out of China essentially but the problem is that we don't operate that way so we we follow we like follow the sun in terms of supporting our our infrastructure so this team

that I inherited had been significantly downsized Okay so I I inherited this team that was very much in like a a problem State again no fault of anyone's just given the different Dynamic of how this team needed to be operated so now I had two teams right and it was like okay like you got to make this work so I did and then I focused on that so now I had these two teams and we had to move forward on things and then I ended up getting a new manager and we had a really good working relationship and she actually was having conversations with me to basically say like I know like this is the trajectory and and was I'll get kind of get to this but she would put me like over the P the next year and a bit that we work together

she would go to put me up for promotion and that's because she had told me the things from my skip level that what's expected of me and we had good alignment and I was doing them so where I'm going with this is that I was giving or sorry given more responsibility I continued to deliver on the things I was asked to do and then finally when it came time for promotion my manager did put me up and so for me this is a huge step because if you're at a point where your manager isn't comfortable putting up for promotion it's because they don't feel that they have enough sort of I don't like using the word ammunition but they don't have enough like confidence and their ability to defend putting up for promotion because they should feel like they can talk about all of your

accomplishments all these things and then when people question it or say well what about X or what about y like you should be able to say yes and like here's a really good example or when they're saying like what are some of the biggest growth areas they've had or what are some of their biggest challenges they should feel confident they can like kind of defend you in those conversations and basically the result of those conversations was not enough visibility and that feedback to me really bothered me and I kind of talked about this in the video that this person is referencing really bothered me because I was like well what do you mean not enough visibility because if I'm being told that these are the important things to work on they're either they wrong things because people don't see them or they're like or there's

something like kind of fundamentally wrong about how we're approaching like promoting people if I'm doing the important stuff and someone's like oh yeah but the people making the decision don't know about it then go put the people that know about it in the position to make the decision kind of a weird dynamic so me hearing that the and this isn't like a I don't know the right word it's not like me like in spite right I'm not trying to do this in spite but it's like the question that comes to my mind is like well if I'm doing good work and I've Been Told I'm doing good work if I need to increase my visibility like what does that mean do I just need to make sure that I'm sharing updates with other people and so this is this is a really difficult thing for

me to navigate because I'm like do I spend more time not doing the important work because I need to be trying to make it more visible so now I'm spending time making things visible like this just doesn't feel like a good use of time so the learning that I had I actually reached out um I did a couple things I reached out to another um group engineering manager so sort of um I don't know what you call I don't want to say like the tier above me but like sort of that's a role that's above me okay they're the manager of managers and I reached out to one from partner teams I was working with and I said hey look like I actually work with like three or four people from your from your sub teams and I said I'm trying to put like basically

get promoted and I was curious if you had any feedback for me and they were absolutely awesome not only did they give me their direct feedback but they went and talked to the different sub teams the managers and sort of like principal Engineers from those teams and drafted an email that had feedback from those people to basically you know document like Nick has impact and I can see it and like therefore some visibility so that was a really helpful thing I think and what I did after that to try and like get a better understanding of visibility is I reached out to another sort of like partner level group engineering manager that I don't like work like very close with but I've had some interactions with and I said hey like random question but like you've been at Microsoft for a while like you you

probably understand these things very well so I said could we talk about visibility and like kind of what that means um so the way that he was framing visibility that I thought was very helpful for me was like it's not just about like doing work so do whatever work that is aligned to the business or not uh whatever work that you're doing it's not just about like emailing out and giving status updates so like people hear about it he's like sure that like that can help increase awareness of what's going on but he said often when people are talking about visibility it's that um the like it's almost like the work itself should the impact of it should speak to the visibility so basically even if you're doing good work if it's not at an impact enough impactful enough level then people that are making

decisions about promotions don't have visibility into it so it's almost like the scope of the work I'm doing does not have significant enough impact so the way that I interpret that is actually the stuff that I was tasked with was not of significant enough importance for the business to be able to justify promoting me now is that my manager's fault I don't think so is that my skip level manager's fault like he was part of kind of aligning that like Charter for me I don't think so um but I think and like this is kind of why it's a bit of a frustrating thing I think that this is a bit of like a bureaucracy politics kind of thing in larger companies now one of the things that makes this really difficult is that not only did I have a change in managers but we

actually moved out from under my skip level manager and we had a new like I had a new skip level manager and a new manager and then our entire product side of the organization reorg as well so as much as people say that when you change managers there should be continuity and sort of like I don't know the visibility into the work you're doing uh I very much felt like I lost that channel of visibility so in terms of the impact I was doing is basically like people had my my manager and my my new skip level had to learn about the stuff that I was tased they had to go learn and understand what impact I would be having so I personally and I'm not blaming them but I think that something like a reorg in my situation was extremely unhelpful with respect to

visibility so knowing what I know now what I probably could have done a better job of is during those times where like I have a new manager new skip level the work that I was doing that was important I probably should have been communicating more and expl like almost like educ I don't want to say edating them because that makes it sound like they're I don't know like not intelligent or something but I just mean like like demonstrating catching them up to speed on the significance of that work so that they don't have to because they're they have to learn so many things when they're coming on board like I have the team I'm responsible for my manager has me with my team plus more and the skip level has like a bigger umbrella so there's just way more for them to try and get

up to speed on but I think I could have done a better job uh it's not just the status updates like hey look we're at like 75% now we're 90% done but more about like when the work is landing and the impact it has being able to say hey look big milestone achieved here's why this is so impactful and I think I could have done a better job broadcasting that not necessarily to the other teams but almost just up through my manager and my Skip and I think that that could have been something that was more helpful so that's kind of my experience with that at Microsoft um going to a new team at the beginning of 2024 I switch teams and what's interesting about this Dynamic now is my skip or sorry my direct manager is like the same level as my skip level

manager before so and then my skip level is like I don't even know that they have like the same job title so I don't know who's whose level is higher kind of thing but doesn't matter I have two people in my reporting chain that are um very understanding of how a lot of this works and what's really cool is when I came onto the team my manager has been so supportive of trying to align me with work that he knows is very high visibility from a business impact perspective and what's been great about that is that he's kind of like thrown me into the deep end on it saying like this is like one of these common themes that I actually appreciate it some like it feels kind of scary right but I will deliver it's scary but like that's my track record and I

know how I operate so I will go deliver on those things um and they trust me to do that so it's uh it's cool just to know that I'm supported in that way um so the tricky part is like I had to switch managers right so again does it reset your progress people say no but I'm like I think it does I absolutely think it does in this case maybe not back to zero when I switch teams but I do think that it it has a huge impact uh on on sort of your progression in terms of the impact that you've had for example I don't know if anyone knows or understands any of the impact I had in the past two years aside from the last year of work because there isn't continuity in it as much as people try okay so that's been

my experience um I think going forward and like what I've been trying to do uh in terms of increasing visibilities number one that alignment with my manager I think is critical so you hear me talk about this all the time in my videos um having level set expectations is key and in this case my manager understands that for me to be able to get promoted it's not just about doing the good work but it's about aligning it with impact work so he's been very transparent about that's a requirement for me and that's why he's aligning that kind of work with my responsibility so um that's like what I'm trying to say is for you in your case like have conversations with your manager about it if you know that visibility is a challenge bring that up like have and it's not like which manager or

which I don't know what titles you have in the organizations you're working in like senior manag manager group engineering manager which ones are going to see this it's not about like who's seeing it like specifically it's more that like the impact of the work you're doing is significant enough that people are aware of it that's like the main takeaway so just like when you're having conversations with your manager about your priorities try to bring that up in the conversation like hey like I know we're talking about that I have to do this project or lead this project or if you're a manager yourself and you're like have to you know help these teams lead these projects can we talk about the business impact of those and the significance in like in that impact across the organization because it's not that you should just say well

no I'm not doing it then but you may want to say hey in order for me to get promoted like is you know when it comes to visibility is this significant enough impact now unfortunately like I would say that I would want to just trust my manager in that um that didn't work in the previous case for me right and I don't like it's not her fault I think she was doing and she put me up for promotion so she felt confident in it but you might be in a similar situation where your manager is like I think that this is sufficient and it happens to not be but again it's feedback and then you can take that and you can try to improve on it so okay like what's the next project can we make sure that this one is has enough impact or

your continuing projects and the the efforts are landing on those ones and now you can say like look I've landed this impact so I think there's opportunities there but communication with your manager level set expectations and that stuff it's just it's something that will always come up on this channel I won't shut up about it so I think that's one thing um and now I'm making sure that I am doing a little bit more communication on a regular basis with uh with stakeholders again I said at the beginning of this video I don't think that that's necessarily like the trick to it but I'm practicing it because that means that I also have to keep bringing it up to my manager it means when I'm having conversations with my skip level manager like these things are top of mind for me um I have more

collaboration with some of our um you know higher level product managers now as well so like they know I'm working on this stuff and like the point is that there's more surface area of people that I'm talking to about the work that I'm leading so I think that really helps from a visibility perspective um okay so a lot of this I realize this is like my experience but I kind of told you at the beginning of this it's mostly going to be me kind of chatting through that um decision makers at promotion Roundtable don't know me I want to come back to this part right now um because this is kind of what I experienced in that first phase I was talking through apparently the people who were making the decision about my promotion they were like well we don't really know what work Nick

is doing and it's like well uh so I think that's one of those examples kind of where I was saying if you're doing some effort to articulate the impact to the organization that could be I don't know like uh some teams do newsletters it's one example um where it's like a monthly newsletter um bi-weekly newsletter just to give some updates not like hey we checked in these you know these commits or something but like this is the impact that we've landed like that might be a really good opportunity to start communicating some of that more broadly um so there's an an opportunity um and then the other thing too is like if you you might notice that if you're not working on projects that are cross team at the level where this is probably expected for visibility like that might be a good conversation to

have with your manager like hey like I know I'm doing all this work within the team and stuff but like even even if you're doing work within the team maybe it's helping other teams or like unlocking some capabilities where they can integrate and stuff with you whatever it happens to be but if you're not aware or you're not yeah maybe I'll say it this way if you're not aware of like who the other stakeholders on these different teams are that you're impacting like maybe have a conversation with your manager to understand that better and then go reach out to them right and if you and if your manager like ah yeah that's really only for us or whatever like maybe have conversations about hey like for my next project is there something I can do cross team or something that has impact that looks like

this because what I'm trying to say is you might be able to create some opportunities for yourself to go have conversations with those other stakeholders like literally like get on a call get to know them um and then maybe you establish a little bit of a Cadence with keeping them updated on some of the project status and stuff just so like instead of saying like hey the the people that are at the round table making the decision don't know me it's like okay well try to increase that opportunity when that's happening it's not a bulletproof solution I'm not here to give you made up solutions to things I'm just trying to say like that might be something that helps um certainly something that I will be trying in the future right if it comes up again okay the last one here is limited in office

presence this one's interesting um I think that this is going to be very situational and kind of means like it's going to be a bit of a generic answer here but um I don't my personal belief is that I don't want to um feel that being in office is required for any of this stuff if we are remote companies and we support remote workers it shouldn't matter caveat I think that it does a little bit and this goes back to the title of the video that this person was referring to and and it's like increasing the surface area for luck which is a shitty thing to have to kind of bring up when we're talking about promotions now this is how I would put this at least in my situation uh I have a lot of confidence in my manager aligning me with work that's

valuable okay so that's if we park that let's pretend that's on the side if I were to say okay for my skip level manager and potentially um his um his peer on the product side how often am I having chat conversations with them the you won't know uh the answer is like it's not that often and if I were never in the office that's the only exposure I'm really having with them so it better be the case that my manager is sort of managing up to them and talking about his team including me and on the stuff that I'm doing but that's like that's just one pathway of communication so when I talk about the service area of luck here when I go into the office I'm literally in the same big room as the skip level on the product side and the skip level

uh in in my work so I get to have conversations with them they they know me and the work that I'm doing and we have conversations about about it and they'll talk about some strategic things it's like hey like this is why this works important when this works wrapped up like this is the direction we're going so like it's not about even me R like and I I totally trust that my manager would be having those conversations but it's almost like I don't have to rely on that because I'm also creating those opportunities I am increasing my service area hopefully not because it's luck but I hope you get the idea behind that so I I do go into the office as you might know because it's code commute except obviously not the moment but I go in because number one it's actually helpful for

me to get FaceTime with my team number two I think there's some really good conversations in terms of just like being creative sitting down and like whiteboarding stuff that I really appreciate and number three like I get some of this opportunity to meet with people that I otherwise wouldn't have FaceTime with um that can be very impactful so this is me kind of saying out loud like I feel like there is an advantage to getting some FaceTime it's not that it's not that you cannot create those opportunities in other ways but for me the and like my personality and like the way that I reach out to people and stuff on on teams and that kind of thing like it would be harder for me there might be other people that are totally good at like creating those opportunities remotely a very is going to

sound like a tangent but a comparable thing that I brought up before is new employees when they on board most of them that I found that are remote have a very difficult time the ramp Up's kind of slow but some of them I've seen are absolutely awesome and they're the ones that are willing to reach out and get conversations going get on block I feel like for me in terms of communicating to my Skip and to other stakeholders and stuff like if I saw them in the office it would be way easier but remote I'm like it's just not happening so anyway I think that I think that it's advantageous for me to do it I'm not saying that it's like an unfair Advantage necessarily but it works better for me so I think that that is something that can help um but yeah honestly

like uh the visibility stuff is tricky um the the way that I try to get my head out of thinking like hey this is just distracting from engineering stuff is going back to the fact that the work itself needs to be impactful at a scale where people are going to see it and have visibility into it not necessarily just like I'm going to keep blasting out every time a commit goes in and tell everyone it's done um but if you want to improve the odds of that visibility I do think that summarizing impact and sending it out to stakeholders could be very valuable so some options there um I hope this helps I realize it's not like a next three simple steps to visibility and yay but um sometimes I think chatting through this stuff and having different perspective about what someone else has gone

through hopefully you listen to this and you're like H like if you've experienced something like this maybe maybe that resonated and you feel better about your experience you have some ideas and if you haven't been through something like this with visibility being like a restriction kind of like the beginning of my career I'm hopeful that this is something that at least is now in your head where you're like I wonder if my situation changes this is something I need to think about so I think it's the best I got on this one but I hope that helps if you have other questions please leave them in the comments or send me a message Dev leader on social media or Nick centino on LinkedIn just send me a message and we'll chat soon take care