Recognising good work

Good work is often overlooked - these links discuss how to avoid that.

Get your work recognized: write a brag document

The tactic is pretty simple! Instead of trying to remember everything you did with your brain, maintain a “brag document” that lists everything so you can refer to it when you get to performance review season!

When your coworker does great work, tell their manager

I think this is pretty simple – managers don’t always see the work their reports are doing, and if someone is doing really amazing work that their manager isn’t seeing, they won’t get promoted as quickly. So it’s helpful to tell managers about work that they may not be seeing.

Being glue

Your job title says “software engineer”, but you seem to spend most of your time in meetings. You’d like to have time to code, but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone’s going roughly in the same direction. If you stop doing those things, the team won’t be as successful. But now someone’s suggesting that you might be happier in a less technical role. If this describes you, congratulations: you’re the glue. If it’s not, have you thought about who is filling this role on your team?

Technical skills alone won’t make you productive

Productivity comes from avoiding unnecessary work, and unnecessary work is a temptation you’ll encounter long before you reach the point of writing code.

In this post I’m going to cover some of the ways you can be unproductive, from most to least unproductive. As you’ll see, technical programming skills do help, but only much further along in the process of software development.

Migrating up the tech ladder

If there’s a big, complex, scary, maybe boring-sounding migration coming up, volunteer for it. It’s not glamorous, eye-catching work, but you will learn a lot from the experience.

Setting cross-government design community objectives

We want to make it as easy as possible for people to get involved. To do this, we held a session with the Heads of Design from departments across government to agree cross-government design community objectives.

These are objectives that people across government can add to their annual performance objectives, to show how contributing to the community is an integral part of their role.

On mid-career and managers

If you find yourself struggling to work effectively with your manager in your mid-career, it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. As you enter mid-career, you will likely also find that your managerial relationships end up changing, both in terms of what you can expect from those relationships and in terms of what you end up needing from them.

Help! I have a manager!

Ever felt confused about what your manager’s job is? Don’t know how to communicate with them? Want to get promoted but aren’t sure how it works? This zine gives you a few tips for how to work together with your manager better! It explains how you and your manager can work ❤together❤ to get awesome work done.