Sell Yourself

It's not enough to be just be good. Other people need to know how good you are.

Whether you like it or not, an important part of getting recognition for your work (and promotions!) is making sure other people know about what you've accomplished. You can't just rely on the quality of your work speaking for itself or expect others to just see how much you've done.

This needs to be communicated both directly to individuals (i.e. explicitly listing out your wins to your manager during a performance review) and broadly to your team. This broad communication can be as simple as posting a recent win in a public Slack channel or as formal as presenting a project to at an engineering team all-hands. The more senior you are, the more important it is to expand your audience and scope of impact.

While it can be tempting to write off self-promotion as bragging, it's important to remember that you understand your accomplishments better than anyone else and communicating is as much a part of your job as coding, especially as you get further on in your career.