#45: Brag Doc 📈
Impact Over Everything 👑
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மாலை வணக்கம் (maalai vaNakkam), Buenas Noches, and Good Evening from New York City!
I’ll be sharing a thing I did and a thought I had.
A Thing 🎥
I published a recipe and a video for üraippu shrimp!
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This is one of my favorite ways to eat shrimp. It's got a perfect balance of warming spices, fiery habanero, and a glossy sauce that just won’t quit.
Sometimes, I use it in a Tamil Shrimp Fried Rice. Other times, I eat it with veechu roti.
If you’re lucky enough to get some of Kitchen Guerrilla’s sauces, you need to make this.
Whoever you make it for will fall in love with you. Be careful. How do I know?
Because I love myself 💜
A Thought 💭
Last week, I sat down with one of my engineering mentees to review their brag doc.
They’ve been promoted from a junior dev to senior in 4+ years. They’re now trying to get to staff.
Their accomplishments were impressive.
They’ve migrated secrets from one system to another.
They didn’t mention it was part of a migration that will save the company $10M/year.
They added critical debugging information to the on-call run books.
They didn’t mention it increased the resiliency of on-call rotation by 5 humans.
They updated an upstream data exploration process to resolve quicker.
They didn’t mention it used to take 2 weeks, now it takes 1 day.
The conversations we had about each win dredged up the impact.
Whether that's the number of dollars saved, number of humans touched, or number of developer days saved.
Beyond Senior Engineer, the game changes.
Knowing and communicating the impact of the technical work is key.
I use this shape for wins in my brag doc. It ensure I am prompting myself for the business impact:
“My {{contribution}} in {{project-name}} enabled {{result}} with {{metric}}; accomplishing {{goal}}.
It’s critical to be clear about what your technical work enables, in.a quantified, goal-oriented perspective.
Your manager is up to their necks in the inefficiencies of your company.
Equip your manager for calibration meetings with a well-written brag doc.
Make it easy for them to get you paid.
With Love,
Janahan
P.S. If you want to have a conversation about your brag doc, book a slot on my calendly. Happy to help :)
Whenever you're ready, there are 2 additional ways I can help you:
1. If you’re looking to break past the senior software engineer glass ceiling, I’d recommend starting with this affordable course. These are the secrets I’ve learned from going from a mid-level to a Distinguished Engineer in less than 4 years. Join 94+ students from over 20 countries.
2. If you want to grab coffee in New York City, hit reply to let me know when you’re in town ☕
Thanks for giving the details! Will use it.
Brag doc link looks broken 🙁
Gonna try your recipe. I'll let you know how it goes. I also like this idea of impact/everything outside of engineering and getting accustomed to thinking in terms of the impact we make when we complete projects or accomplish our goals.
I'm going to start a brag doc for myself. I usually try to do a bulleted list of what I've accomplished each day so that I can pass the energy from the fuel of my wins into the planning for the next day.
I've been wanting to do an annual review for sometime and thinking in terms of impact might help me process and correct as I'm going, and get even clearer on approaches to my goals/bets.
Thanks for sharing, J!