unknown

Engineering managers should own visibility for their team's work rather than pushing engineers to self-promote. When engineers need brag docs, skip-levels, and constant self-marketing to get recognized, it signals broken management systems. Managers should restructure 1:1s for discovery, handle upward communication themselves, create team rituals that surface work naturally, actively sponsor quiet contributors, and separate impact from self-promotion ability in evaluations. The visibility problem is a management responsibility, not an engineering one.

Stop telling your engineers to "work on visibility"

Stephane Moreau

Never thought about it like that. I’m playing the visibility game myself right now, because I’m shooting for a lead position. On the one hand it’s like playing a game and rewarding in its own way, but on the other it feels so phony. I don’t want to become this person who posts slop to LinkedIn because I need to be seen by the right people.
I’m starting to think about projects in terms of exposure instead of engineering impact and that’s bothering me. It’s hard not so loose yourself in the process.

I couldn’t agree more. This doesn’t just affect the visibility of our work, it also influences how seriously our ideas are taken. I’ve noticed that because I don’t self-promote enough and I’m most of the time overlooked even in my own area of expertise.

Agreed on that, engineers should only need to care about their performance. These self visibility should be handled by the managers.

Agreed on that. Some people style is to work quietly and they are actually doing most of the real work. This is the character of vast slice of devs. Should they be cancelled just because management is lazy and require loud rockstar devs to do dev+management job?

As an engineering leader, I could not agree more.