The Pattern #6 - Perception
Your perception is your reality
I recently got promoted from Mid to Senior Engineer, and I thought I would share my insights in a promotion article series for those looking to achieve the same. The opportunity to get promoted has to be available and to be considered is dependant on the perception of you, which is influenced by your skills.
In this article, I will be going over the perception aspect.
Read the first article on opportunity here
Perception
TL:DR It’s important to cultivate a positive self perception as it dictates how you move in the world. This will unlock the confidence to work on what matters in your organisation in a visible way. But remember to also work on things that you can take away with you outside of your organisation.
I would break down perception into 3 categories; self, internal and external.
Self - how you view yourself
Internal - how you are viewed inside the company
External - how you are viewed outside the company
Lets dive into each one separately.
Self
Your perception is your reality.
How you perceive yourself, dictates how you move in the world. So its crucial to have the mindset that you can achieve senior.
In a industry rife with imposter syndrome that, isn’t an easy task as it first appears.
It starts with reflection. It's easy to look forward and compare yourself to others. But first take a step back and compare yourself now to back when you first started trying to break in. In a similar vein, this is just the next mountain to climb.
It has always been you vs you.
I’ve talked about dealing with imposter syndrome more in a previous article.
Lets take some practical examples of how low perceived self value can dictate how you move in the world:
Staying quiet in meetings. You don’t value your input and so you don’t contribute much, if anything.
Instead, give your thoughts first, whatever they may be. That creates opportunities to discuss your line of thoughts and explore your ideas more e.g. “I had a think about this problem earlier and have some thoughts I’d like to share…”
Getting overwhelmed at complex tasks. You don’t have confidence in your ability to break down complex tasks into smaller more solvable components.
Instead, publicly break down the problems your working on into smallest constituents, say in a slack thread, and get feedback from the team lead/senior engineers e.g. “This task feels like there are a lot of moving parts I have broken the problem into logical steps in the ticket, could you take a look when you get a chance”
Internal
To build positive perception of you, work on what matters and make it visible.
Work on What Matters
Ideally you want to work on low-effort, high-impact tasks.
In a large and established organization, most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. You don't want to work on high-effort, low-impact tasks because that's a waste of time.
You end up with two main categories of work as a result: low-effort, low-impact, which is comfortable but doesn't contribute much, and high-effort, high-impact, which is where the real growth happens.
As good as this sounds in theory, how do we actually identify those tickets?
Well, some tell tale signs (not all in one ticket of course) include:
Collaboration - Involves cross-functional collaboration
Automation - Automates a tedious repetitive manual task
Pain points - Removes major pain points that teams have been facing for a while
Hard - It may well be difficult to implement with a lot of moving parts
I once picked up a ticket to investigate an intermittent error affecting many pipelines. The error was challenging to trace, but after thorough investigation, I discovered it was tied to the authentication process.
Updating this was far from simple. The pipeline was used by multiple teams, and the fix required implementing a new authentication workflow. However, I knew the value in making the change—it would save tens of hours of developer frustration and boost productivity as they were not having to rerun pipelines uncessarily.
I developed the new workflow, rigorously tested it, and documented the changes and benefits in Confluence to help teams transition smoothly. Completing this work meant tackling a high-impact challenge that wasn't easy and required cross-team collaboration since everyone relied on that pipeline.
Make Your Work Visible
Don’t hesitate to present your technical work and highlight its impact. Many of us shy away from this. If you've worked on a sizable ticket and think it was high impact, share it with your department.
Often, other teams aren't aware of what you're working on, so take the opportunity to present it at a company-wide forum, like a "show and tell." If your company doesn't have something like that, you could:
Propose starting a “show and tell” for your department
Post in the relevant channel when you accomplish something notable
Your manager can support you in this. If you've done something worth sharing, ask your manager to post about it in the channel. It might feel a bit uncomfortable, but visibility is important. You want people to recognize your competence and contributions.
For example, I created a “Platform Release Notes” page in Confluence, where any major changes to the platform would be documented. Individuals could follow this page for updates, and I would also post in the Slack channel to keep everyone informed. For the authentication issue I mentioned earlier, my Slack message was something like:
“Hey team, I’ve updated the auth process to resolve the ephemeral issue we’ve been experiencing in our pipelines. For details on the specific changes you need to make, check out the Platform Release Notes here.”
This approach also had the added benefit of creating a catalog of work that I and others on my team had completed, making it easier to track and showcase our contributions over time.
External
Even if you have a good internal perception, it's crucial to have an external presence.
When you leave your company, people may not fully recognise how hard you worked, whether you tackled the most impactful tasks or the quality of the work you delivered. You can talk about it your CV of course, but that requires for it to be read in some depth.
If you were to view your effort it in terms of currency, its one that doesn’t hold much value outside of the company.
So its important to also work on things that can take with you. I call these ‘take awayables’.
Lucky for us with some effort we can exchange that ‘local’ currency for a global one. To do this it needs some effort on your part into transforming your work into take awayables.
Here are some ways you can do that:
Write Articles: If you've worked on a technically complicated ticket, even if it wasn't a major project, write an article about it. Chances are, other people in the industry have faced similar issues.
Here is an article I wrote on centralised log monitoring in GCP.
Create Technical Videos: Making videos about topics you have working familiarity with helps in two key ways, even if you are still in the process of learning it. It will help solidify your own understanding and positions you as an expert in that field.
Here is my friends Youtube Channel where he was creating Kubernetes tutorials as he was preparing for his Kubernetes exams - saedf0
Give Talks: If you're not comfortable giving talks publicly, do a small talk for friends/colleagues (in the same field ideally) privately. Putting into practice explaining technical work helps build your confidence.
Side Projects: We all know about side projects. They're a great way to showcase your ability.
Here is a project I built whilst trying to break into DevOps - infra-get-scheduled
Certifications: Not only is it a take awayable but often one that you can get your company to pay for !
I hope reading this article has changed your perception on the importance of perception. Stay tuned for more articles in our Promotion series !
Plugs
A collection of interesting links I’ve found from trawling the internet
Al-An'am (The Cattle) - Sheikh Abdullah Al Juhany
git shortcuts (oh-my-zsh) - ZSH Configuration manager that makes me feel like a 10x developer
Let me google that - Just got asked a question that is easily Googleable ? I’ve got the perfect plug for you !
How to be tax resident in no country and pay 0% tax - Anyone else tired of being taxed to no end ?
R2D3 - A visual introduction to machine learning. Incredibly clean website.
Keyboard University - I’ve started getting into custom keyboards recently and used this website to learn more.