Resources

People often ask me "How did you learn how to hack?" The answer: by reading. This page is a collection of the blog posts and other articles that I have accumulated over the years of my journey. Enjoy!

Building a reputation within a company is hard. Many people think it's through being talented but this probably isn't the case. Many strong engineers are unrecognized and many bad engineers are very well recognized. Why is this? The author discusses the natural Ratchet Effect.

Initially, you have a starting point that is not the lowest, but it is the lowest. Similar to how you join Chess.com at a 1200 rating. Judgements are made quickly at this stage. At first, you're only given regular JIRA tickets, bug fixes and nothing that stands out. Over time, your team, that sees the work, sees you and you gain status.

Since you did a good job on the work, you are given more work with visibility from other teams. If you did a good job at this, this creates even more positive visibility. This gives you a higher status within the organization. As you repeat this process with more and more teams, you are assigned higher and higher-profile projects until you reach your limit. All of a sudden, the CEO is choosing you by name to lead a project. Why?

Reputation is quick to form but very slow to change. Once someone outside of your immediate circle has a good or bad opinion about you, it's likely to stay. Individual teammates may know your skills more accurately but the skip managers only see the original perspective. It's hard to get out of this.

Some people try to jump straight into high-profile work to prove themselves, whether they are new hires or those with a bad reputation. According to the author, this usually doesn't work. Most of the time, big projects have a lead put on it ahead of time. Second, executes have a clear picture who is good and bad; if it's a key project, they won't risk putting a bad person on it.

What's the best way to gain clout? Focus on small pieces of work to build a reputation. Slowly pick up the importance of things to transition to higher-profile and more visible work. Your first high-visibility project is critical to forming a reputation with more senior management so you better do well on this one. If you have a failure, slowly build back with small successes.

Overall, a good piece on building yourself up as a good engineer at a company.