3+1 strategies to track your achievements as a software engineer
Discover expert strategies for software engineers to get promoted at work. Learn how to create a public page, work log, and brag doc to boost your career. Unlock the path to becoming a senior software
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How do you track your achievements?
At the beginning of my career, I had one document where I listed all my achievements.
At first, I wrote down everything I did.
Later on, I realized not everything was important enough to add it.
It was hard to decide if something should go to the document or not.
I had trouble removing work from the past. In the end, it’s my hard work.
Needless to say, that document was a Frankenstein without a storyline.
But that’s not my process now.
In this post, you’ll learn:
The strategy to validate your intentions
The strategy to record periodically your achievements
The strategy to socialize your achievements and make them stand the test of time.
Extra strategy: How to prepare 1:1s without effort
#1 Validate your intentions
Strategy: The public page.
In software engineering, we talk about planning and designing before we jump into code
The same applies to our priorities.
The first time I found this idea was from Stephen Wan in an interview shown in Will Larson’s book “Staff Engineer: Leadership Beyond the Management Track”. Another example is Thomas Frank’s public page (outdated)
Your priorities on your public page determine what you say “yes” and “no” to. Having them public, you can validate them with your managers. And you don’t need excuses to say “no” to some piece of work. Just share this page.
Also, you write your milestones for each week.
You can visualize if you are overcommitted or not working on your priorities. And you can keep validating them from the planning phase, not once you are committed to them.
I do this document but I keep it private. Writing this post I realized that I’d benefit from socializing it for validation
