If you do something, say something!

Machiavelli for software engineers #1

This is the first in a series of articles I am calling "Machiavelli for software engineers". In the articles in these series I will cover topics that are related to power and influence in organizations.

"Power" is an interesting concept, it is at the same time one of the least liked and the most sought after things in life, especially in business life. People who have power often deny that they do, whereas people who don’t have any will typically never say they are looking to get some.

I have a fairly neutral view of power: It is simply the ability to either bring about wanted change or to block unwanted change. Getting promoted, bagging a fun new project, getting that tech lead role, not getting laid off, influencing the design of a new system, switching to Rust; all of these require power.

If you don't have power, you are relying on charity.

Power is often associated with negative things. But remember that bringing good things about requires power too. Do you like the coding standards in your company? Or the new vacation policy? Or free sushi in the company restaurant? All of these things required power to make them happen. 

"If power is to be used for good, more good people need power" -- Jeffrey Pfeffer

My thinking on this topic has been heavily influenced by the work of (the above quoted) Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. He has written many papers and books about power and how to get it. His latest book, "7 Rules of Power" is a master class on getting power in organizations.

The articles in this series lean heavily on Pfeffer's book and give some light hearted suggestions on how to become more powerful and influential, based on my own experiences. They are however no replacement for Pfeffer's book for the seriously power hungry :-)

And now…. this week’s Wednesday Wisdom…

(Like this article? Read more Wednesday Wisdom!)

Here is an anti-pattern for those who want to get ahead in their careers: Doing good work and then keeping quiet about it.

In my first job I was a systems programmer (an SRE avant la lettre) on IBM mainframes at a large Dutch bank. One of our responsibilities was the installation and support of the mainframe operating systems. This was always non-obvious because each new version came with software compatibility issues, requirements for new versions of third party software, and now incompatible hardware. After one particular upgrade we got a call from a user somewhere in the bank who complained that their terminal was no longer working. We asked what kind of terminal it was, because our 3270 terminals were all doing just fine. Turned out they had some super duper graphics terminal that did indeed require special support.

We looked into it and it turned out that that terminal type was indeed not supported with the new version of the OS. And not just that, it also wasn't supported with the OS version we just replaced, or the one before that. We were at a loss at how this had worked at all, ever...

After digging around a bit we found that one of our team members had written his own driver for the terminal and ported it to successive versions of the operating system, without telling anyone about it. He was currently on vacation and hence the needful had not been done.

There are of course a lot of things wrong with this scenario, but the thing of interest right now is that he had done some cool and valuable work and not told anyone about it! Because of that he had never gotten any credit for it. Of course we knew he was awesome, but with this new knowledge it turned out he was even more awesome than we already knew.

Fast forward a few decades.

At Meta I was in a team that was in charge of our continuous deployment tools. One of my colleagues had toiled away for months on some problem that was both organizationally and technically complex. He had adapted the software and then talked to umpteen teams to get them to adapt their deployment jobs. And then finally he was ready to declare success. Or was he….?

At the next team meeting the team’s manager wanted to drop attention to this effort: "Ok, X, you have something to announce, right?" My colleague, a notably quiet person, looked at everyone nervously and said: "Uhh, well, Y is now fully deprecated and everyone is using Z" (or words to that effect).

Cue crickets…. As the meeting was about to move on to the next topic, I interjected: "Whoa, hang on, there, that description completely glossed over what a huge accomplishment this was!" I then continued to praise this particular colleague, described how much work had gone into it, and how well he had done this because he had managed to deprecate the old thing and move everyone to the new thing without downtime and without impact on running deployments.

If you do something, say something!

It sounds obvious, but how is anyone going to know how awesome you are if you yourself are not tooting your own horn?

Like it or not, you are competing with other people for scarce opportunities. One of the ways to bag those is to make it known that you are amazing and will probably succeed at whatever it is that you are tasked with next. Doing great work and then not telling anyone about it only ensures that nobody knows what you are capable of. It is not helpful. At least, not to you.

There are many cultural aspects to self-promotion. I come from a country where one of the most popular sayings is "If you act like a normal person you are already acting crazy enough" (Doe maar gewoon, dan doe je al gek genoeg). Modesty is an important cultural value in Holland and people do not like to draw attention to their accomplishments. This is even worse for the people outside of the Randstad (the built up industrialized part of the country).

Other countries are even worse in this respect. I am not an expert on different cultures from around the globe, but my experiences working in a variety of countries and with people from very different cultures indicate that there are many cultures where being quiet and modest is considered important. In a lot of cultures this is especially true for women who, according to way too many people, should apparently be "seen and not heard" (or in some cases, not even seen either).

These rules are there to benefit the already powerful.

Where I come from, being loud about your own accomplishments is seen as being "American", and apparently that’s a bad thing 🙂. Being a European living in the US, I can certainly see the source of that: American culture celebrates success more easily and openly and spends significantly more time teaching children public speaking and presentation skills. For better or for worse, the world is becoming more American, and the tech world even faster than most countries or parts of society. I worked in the Swiss office of a large US tech giant and that was in many ways a small pocket of the USA in the heart of Zürich. 

To be successful in an American company, you have to act like Americans do.

Side note: I spent a fair amount of the nineties teaching courses for big American computer manufacturers like Sun, HP, and Digital. We regularly got the feedback that the American instructors were much better than the Dutch ones. The source of this statement was the evaluations that the students filled out after every course in which they ranked a number of things, including the instructor and the instructor’s knowledge, on a scale of 1-10. The roll-up of these numbers completely glossed over the fact that when something is quite good a typical American will declare it to be “amazing” (10) and a typical Dutch person will describe it as “not bad at all” (7).

So if you are doing something great, you need to talk about it! Send emails to the team after successful completion of projects. Give tech talks about cool technology you developed. Have your work showcased at the weekly office meeting. Announce your new patent.

A lot of people will say that this shouldn’t be necessary. Surely, in a just world people would be rewarded for their good work even if they did not attract attention to it? Isn’t it the duty of the people in power to correctly remember whomever did what and reward people appropriately or give them opportunities based on that?

I think that you are right; that is probably how the world should work. But, to the best of my observation, that is not how the world does work. We have tons of research that indicates that people who self-promote well do better in their careers. Expecting that you will be treated fairly and then moping when that does not happen might give you the warm glow of righteous indignation, but that's about all you will get out of it.

Another objection I regularly hear is that that sort of communication “just does not come naturally to me”. One hundred percent true. But, guess what, neither does coding. I don't care how much talent you have for instructing the idiot box on your desk, but you really had to study and practice to get any good at it. Same for communication. Sure there are those with God-given talents for it, but to get any good at it everyone needs to study and practice. That takes time and effort. Get on it!

Remember the motto of the round table: Adopt, adapt, improve.

This is especially true for presentations. People are terrified of speaking in public and most people think, correctly, that they are terrible public speakers. Fortunately there is credible research that indicates that whether someone is a good public speaker or not only correlates with whether people in the audience think that the speaker is a good public speaker. Interestingly enough it does not correlate with whether people in the audience can recall anything about the presentation.

Let me repeat that for emphasis: Whether the audience can remember anything useful from a presentation is not correlated with the presentation skills of the speaker!

Instead, recall correlates with the structure of the presentation. I know this sounds incredible and you might not believe me, but read this great book to be convinced.

After reading this book for the first time I completely changed my approach to teaching presentation skills.

Like all good things, blowing your own trumpet should not be overdone. The fact that you managed to push a trivial PR to GitHub is probably not a good reason to give a tech talk or send a memo to the entire team. In order to be impactful, any communication about your accomplishments must be timely and worthy.

Don't overdo it!

There are other (subtle) ways of directing attention to your accomplishments. If you did some good work solving a production incident, be there at the retrospective to showcase what was done. Remember: If you aren't there, somebody else from your team will and there's no telling what they will say and whether they will credit you correctly and equitably. Be in charge of the narrative!

If your company has a story telling time event, go up there and talk about something you did in the past. If you screwed up, go to a Fuckup Nights meeting or similar event and talk about it there. There are tons of opportunities that will allow you to showcase your good work.

Another side effect of being a thorough and consistent communicator about your achievements is that it plays into recency bias. If someone asks your manager "Who is your highest achiever" and they just read an email in which you showcased your latest success, what do you think the answer is going to be? And what do you think the answer is going to be if you never talk about your accomplishments?

In the past I have been accused of being a blatant self-promoter. That's maybe a little bit harsh, but not entirely off the mark. If I do something that I consider good work, people are definitely going to hear about it.

A lot of people incorrectly associate self-promotion with spreading misinformation. This is of course incorrect. There is almost never any need to cross the line into unethical behavior. Never lie. Never take credit for someone else's work. People either know or will find out about it and then they will learn to despise you for it. It might work in the short term, but it probably doesn't work (at least not consistently) in the long term.

Instead, be generous with praise for other people. By being generous you make the entire message easier to digest and will make your story about your own good work easier to believe and appreciate.

So, if you do something, say something. Don't produce great work in silence and then hope to be recognized. It just doesn't work.