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Hard work rarely speaks for itself.
When I landed my first job as a software engineer, I had a simple plan: Work hard and somebody would notice. Eventually a manager would tap me on the shoulder and hand me a promotion (probably with a nice little speech).
That plan stalled my career for about five years.
I switched jobs twice, kept my head down, read a stack of programming books, and sometimes pulled 12-hour days. I was never promoted. At my third job, out of frustration, I started interviewing at other companies and almost immediately got an offer for a senior engineer role.
So I went back to my job and quit. My team was blindsided. I liked my manager and the people I worked with, and they came back with a counteroffer. Then someone from HR asked me, “Why didn’t you just ask us?”
Honestly, it never occurred to me.
I took the counteroffer and stayed. Three jobs in, I finally got promoted, and all it took was asking (in the most dramatic way possible).
Today, I would take a different approach.
Year-end review discussions are a great time to push for a promotion. But at most companies, raises and promotions are largely settled before the formal review conversation happens. If the year-end review is the first time your manager hears you want a promotion, you’re usually too late.
Now is a great time to start the conversation.
Hard work is invisible by default
Engineers tend to believe good work speaks for itself. It rarely does. Your manager is juggling a team, a roadmap, and their own boss. They see a fraction of what you do, and the work they don’t see might as well not exist when raises get decided.
Perception is reality, so you have to shape it. That means learning to brag a little.
A “brag document” is a running list of what you accomplished, when, and why it mattered. Add to it every two weeks or once a month, and write each entry so your manager’s manager would understand it.
Engineers tend to write things like “migrated the billing service.” A better entry reads “migrated the billing service, which cut failed payments by 30 percent and unblocked the Q3 pricing launch.” If there’s no number, name who benefited and how.
Include the work people forget to count, too: handling incidents, mentoring new hires, interviewing candidates, and writing the docs everyone else relies on. If you helped your team adopt AI tools this year, write that down. (It counts as leadership, whether or not anyone called it that.)
The document does two jobs. It gives you ammunition when you make your case, and it gives your manager something to ctrl + c then ctrl + v when they argue for you in meetings you’ll never attend.
Just ask
Bragging builds the case. Asking forces action.
If your goal is a promotion or a raise, you might ask: “What would it take for me to get to [the next level] in the next year?”
A good manager will give you an outline that can turn into a plan. Push for specifics until you have deliverables you can work toward, then send a short recap email so the plan exists somewhere besides your manager’s memory. (Managers change jobs too.)
When the answer is “no”
Sometimes the answer will still be “not this year,” and the reason may have nothing to do with you.
Budgets get frozen, promotion slots get capped, and decisions get made above your manager’s head where even a manager who wants to help can’t.
Don’t read too much into that. But be honest with yourself, too. Most of the time, a no means there’s something you aren’t doing yet. Find out what it is instead of guessing for five years like I did.
Asking costs you one slightly awkward conversation. Sitting back and waiting to be noticed can cost you years.
—Brian
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