Comment by figassis
2 years ago
Your managers need to understand the work that you're doing. When I review someone's code and I see them fixing something potentially catastrophic but that never happened, I definitely remember that and congratulate them. When I see a team member ask a question that makes me or the team rethink implementation strategy. That is very valuable. When a code reviewer finds a potentially critical bug in my code, or just a nuanced bug, I remember and appreciate. Because I fully understand that those are potential p0 or p1 issues.
And great engineers are consistently good at this type of passive, keeping the lights on work, but it does not reflect on their quantifiable work, so orgs do not include this in performance reviews. It is up to your manager to recognize this and advocate for you.
Even when they do recognize it it’s unlikely to be weighed the same as the engineer who heroically stays up all night fixing a critical issue.
Especially with many organizations focused on data or metrics for performance reviews or promotions being able to say you fixed an outage that was costing $X million per hour comes across much better than a vague counterfactual notion that your high code quality prevented Y such outages in the first place.