I felt similarly, earlier in my career. Until a manager explained it this way: "Suppose you make the greatest thing in the world, but nobody knows about it. Wouldn't it be better to have spent 95% of the effort on making a slightly inferior product, and 5% to actually get people to use it? Isn't it more impactful to make something people use? Well, in order to get people to use anything, you have to talk about it."

Thats a cop out by a lazy or self-centered manager. The difference is that it's the manager's job to evaluate you vs marketing a product to an unknown buyer. A good manager would actively work with their employees to know what is going on. Most managers I've seen care about their own performance and hitting target metrica.

If you're not good a marketing a product, you should still spend 100% of your effort on making it great, and hire a marketing person to do the other part.

This only works for external products. People make internal tools all the time that can be used by many teams. You're not going to get a marketing person to market the tool internally, that's wasted money.

At that point, it's really your and your manager's (and so forth) responsibility to ensure your product or tool is in the right hands and helps people.

My manager was great at taking on some of the burdens and shielding me from above, while still giving me the flexibility and incentive to work with other teams and people to make sure I was the one everyone recognized for the work done, as opposed to the team or him.

It depends. Over time, I've seen a lot of cases where other teams were duplicating effort, or product owners or project managers were making bad guesses about what was difficult, or impossible, or already done - and the reason was that they either didn't know what was being worked on or didn't understand the impact.

When your head is down in an interesting, thorny problem, it is easy to forget how those other folks are affected by your work, and it's easy to lose appreciation for the fact that their head is filled with a completely different information set. So it can be very useful to spend 5% of your time on this.

Or heck, just try 2.5% - one hour out of a standard work week. Personal anecdote: I wrote up a little thing about why customers would pick one video encoder over another, and marketing just did backflips and started asking my manager if I could write more things.

This strategy is contrary to everything I know about how great teams work. Great teams are allergic to "not my problem" thinking, and teammates have empathy for each other's roles, meaning they learn about what makes each other tick.

Focusing on your own silo and blaming others for the team's failure results in dysfunction, not success. Instead, take ownership of your job and (shared) ownership of the other jobs that interact with it.

I think you jumped to assume that it's an external product. You have no idea whether the person in question is lazy or self-centered. The person who taught me this was neither.

In either case, at some point you have to convince someone else that it's worth investing their time. External, this can be dollars (although is that really the best way?). Internally (and optimally), you still need to self-market your product to marketers.

Either way, it's better to spend at least a little time doing marketing. Boiled down from all the hype and jargon, marketing is highlighting the benefits to another person. If an IC is working on a project where they don't know the benefits, there is a larger issue.

> If you're not good a marketing a product, you should still spend 100% of your effort on making it great, and hire a marketing person to do the other part

You can't hire a marketing person for yourself. Marketing yourself and your work is important because things don't magically get discovered or recognized.

"stagnation" mens "avoiding the rat race" and it has mental health benefits that masy be worth more than the raise.

I'm stressed because they will find a way to get rid of me if I stagnate too long. They begin to think there is something wrong with you if you haven't moved up. I'm 8 years into my career and this company, I'm a midlevel developer, and have an MSIS.

Sounds like you might consider your quality of life improved with an employer that doesn't expect you to climb arbitrary ladders?

There are a lot of medium-small employers in lesser-known or unsexy domains that under normal circumstances struggle to compete with FAANG/similar to find people. How many are hiring right now I don't know, but it might be an option.

I have a family to support and we basically just make with this income, with the possibility to retire someday. My experience is in Neoxam and FileNet, so my options are limited. My wife won't consider moving, so that brings my options to zero.

That's me. I don't like visibility. I like to do a good job for the sake of the job without bragging.

The dilemma is this... "Ignorance is bliss" - You can't be worried/stressed about problems you don't know...

What if you're consistently doing good work but have zero visibility? Then years down the road, you notice a trend of people around you getting promotions/raises/bounses more often than you? The same people that slack off & lack integrity; to name a few. As a human being with emotions... can you honestly say you won't feel resentful in your moment of realization?

I am asking as someone who's been in that situation more times than I care to admit... I do good work for myself and for the sake of doing good work; I take pride in the work I do... but as most of it was never communicated, no one knew about it and just took it's results for granted; I was bypassed for raises, promotions, etc... Was it worth it? I can't give you a answer... it's a very conflicting place to be.

I have this problem myself. I've gotten around it in the past by taking roles where the visibility is already baked into it, but I've never really solved the root problem. Now I'm a mostly anonymous, invisible contractor at a FAANG, and I don't know that there's a way break through that even for those most determined.

Thanks! Maybe I'll reconsider becoming a chief of staff.

Is there a particular reason you never communicated your work?

I think people have an obligation to share the work they do, especially if it's interesting or impactful. Because if you don't, then generally no one else will.

I'm definitely resentful and demoralized.

That's why having a culture where people share their gratitude for your being helpful, competent and otherwise awesome really matters. The self-promoters always look good, but the best people - and those that make the best leaders - often don't self-promote.

I feel this, and it's challenging because visibility is important for advancement. My manager advised me to think of the broadcast emails/posts as ways to boost the people I collaborated with, and that's helped a lot. It doesn't feel like I'm tooting my own horn, people still see the impact of projects I contributed to, and my colleagues are always enthusiastic to work on projects with me because they know they will get good visibility and be "given" they credit they deserve for their contributions.

Granted my role is very crossfunctional, but I think it's pretty unusual to be consistently impactful working in your own silo. So boosting my collaborators gets me the visibility benefits, without feeling insincere, and contributes to a work culture that is collaborative and supportive.

For context, I lead an analytics team at a FAANG company.