How to Turn Engineering Work into a Promotion

So, I'm going to talk about building a toolkit and neurolinguistic programming? Let's find out more about what that is and what's going on there. Who am I? He gave me an introduction. I'm going to skip over it a bit. You're not really here to learn about me, right? You're here to learn about you and your careers.

The basic thing is that, yes, I used to be a professional opera singer for seven years in Germany. I've written a book about career changing into tech. I've been writing code since I was eight years old, so it wasn't a super unusual thing for me to do, but I learned a lot of lessons along the way and I tried to put that into a book. If you're here, if you're watching this, you're already in tech. The book's not for you. You don't need to buy it. It's cool. I'm not here for that today. I'm here to talk about your jobs. I've also given a TEDx presentation as well. Again, about career changing. Kind of gets a bit predictable after a while.

Three things you should know about me that are important to this talk is that, firstly, I'm an optimist. I tend to believe that a lot of things are actually in our control, that we do actually have a lot of leeway to move our own career forward. Also that most people are, you know, good, or want to be good, and want to help us in our careers as well, and I find that that's a really solid basis to then build on the other part of my personality, which is pragmatism. I'm not here to be like, yeah, good feels. You can do it. Woo. It's not a motivational talk for you today. I'm going to try to give you some real tools to actually get there, and also I have a lot of energy. You probably picked up a little bit on that part already, and hopefully that allows you to stay focused, because these are my two goals. These are my two goals for every talk I give, everywhere. Firstly, be useful. I want you to come away and be like, yeah, I've got something I can actually do tomorrow. Tomorrow's Sunday. So Monday.

Something I can use on Monday, right? And also I don't want you to fall asleep. So I'm not here to do a song and dance, right? That's not my main goal, but I do hope that along the way you, yeah, have a little bit of fun at least.

So first I want to open with a story, as all good talks do, apparently. But actually, this wasn't a planned story. This was a story that came from the flight when I was coming into Amsterdam, and I was talking to the lady next to me on the flight, and I said, I'm going to a conference, and she said, what are you doing? I said, giving a talk about getting a promotion. She said, so neurolinguistic programming, that kind of thing. I was like, yes, what is neurolinguistic programming? I don't know. So of course, as soon as I get to my hotel room, I go to chat.gpt and say, tell me what neurolinguistic programming is, and it tells me that it's about analysing strategies for successful individuals. And I'm like, okay, but that's kind of what every talk is about, right? Like learning from what everyone does. So be more specific. I'm talking about getting a promotion. How does this apply? Give me an example. And it says, well, you could talk about mirroring, body language, and you could talk about how to positive self-talk. I'm like, okay, that's cool. That's all useful stuff. It's not my vibe. So I don't know about you. Again, I'm pragmatic, I'm practical. I'm here to be like, all right, that's cool, but I don't personally believe, no matter how much you go and stand in front of the mirror and say, I can get a promotion. I don't think that's what's going to get you the promotion. It might help a little bit with your confidence, but it's not going to be the thing that gets it. So of course, what will I talk about? I'm going to talk about what goes wrong.

I've sat in on a lot of promotion talks. I've career coached a lot of engineers, especially in my current company, and I've seen a lot of the same patterns emerge. I want to talk very quickly about what I think the core problem is that engineers have with getting promotions and then I'm going to go through three tools. That's probably what most of you are here to learn about. What can I actually do about it? How can I get there? And then I've got a backup plan, just in case the rest doesn't work.

This is what goes wrong. Every engineer who is quality-focused in the world says, I'm just going to do good work, I'm going to do my tickets, I'm going to do my job, and the work will speak for itself. Who here thinks that that's actually what happens? Anyone? No? No hands at all? Yeah, because you're not willing to admit it now, are you? But you thought this before.

But, no, it won't. It's like the tree falling in the woods. Who's actually going to listen to your work if you're not drawing attention to it? The work cannot speak. It is mute, right? Other people are also doing their jobs. They're also focused on what they're doing. They're not paying attention to your work. You can speak for your work, but the work cannot speak for itself. So it's your job to bring attention to the work that you do. Otherwise, it cannot speak. You can be the best engineer in the world, but if no-one's paying attention, no-one's noticing, you're probably not going to get a promotion. So it's all about giving a voice to your work, and that's what I'm going to try to give you today.

This is a quote from me, but I find that when I put it in quotes, it sounds more like I'm really wise, so I like to do this. You'll see this a few times. It's my trick. All right.

So three tools to get you and your work noticed. That's the goal. We all understand now that's the goal. The general principle before we begin with the tools is this. It's another quote from me, by the way. Credit where credit is due, be it me, or be it you. What do I mean by this? As I said, you need to get attention onto your work. I'm a big proponent of not being too humble when it comes to promotions, jobs. When it comes to general life, be as humble as you like, but when you get into a room and you're arguing to get a promotion, or you get into a job interview and you want a new job, that is not the time to be humble. Take the credit. Know what you did and take that credit. Don't be humble, but do not take credit for other people's work. Be that person who lifts up everyone else in your team. If you did it with another engineer, you should be mentioning that other engineer when you're talking about that work. If it's a team effort, you should be mentioning the whole team as part of that effort.

So before I start talking about how unhumble you should be, I do want you to also understand that if you are someone who lifts up the rest of your team and gives them credit, they will also back you up when it comes to talking about your work. So be that person who lifts everyone up. Don't be that person who takes credit when it's not yours.

So step one, form a concrete plan like, duh, Anna, obviously I want a plan to get a promotion. But it's not actually a duh. Has anyone here gone to their manager and actually said directly, I want a promotion in a year? How many? One, two, three, I can count about eight out of maybe, I'm going to take a guess, and say about 150 people. So this is the number one thing. You need to go and be up front and ask this question, what progress would you need to see from me in one year to move from, let's say, a mid-level role to a senior role? What do you need from me? If you've got a good manager, they will say great, let me show you this graph I have. Let me show you this table of career progression.

At my workplace, I was part of building what's called the technical expert track. It's a career matrix. If you're in a bigger company, you probably have a career matrix you can refer to. That helps a lot. If you're in a small and medium company, it may or may not exist for you, where there are actual criteria you can follow as to, like, okay, you've got to be at this kind of level with the programming language, you need to have this kind of mentoring experience, et cetera. If you don't have something like that, then you have to build that with your manager. If you have a good manager, as I said, they will already kind of know how to do this. The problem I've also seen is that there are some managers who don't treat management as a craft. They're more like, oh, I'm just going to go support my people. Peace out, yeah. And they don't actually take the time to go, like, how do I do that effectively? So if you have someone who doesn't know how to do this, it's fine, then you need to learn this. Any management or team lead person will have heard of this before. Maybe you've also heard of it before. This is a guideline for building goals. When you build goals, it shouldn't be like, okay, we might have a well-meaning manager who says, yeah, I guess if you wanted to be a senior, I guess, like, mentor someone, maybe give a talk somewhere. Work on a cool feature. You know? And you're like, okay. Thanks. What do you do with that information? In a year's time. I worked on a cool feature, and I mentored someone. Okay, yeah, but it's still not quite what I meant.

And then you end up in this awful loop where you're not really meeting each other's expectations. But if you create goals in this way, you will find that it's a lot easier to meet them. The first is specific. So if they want you to give a talk, how many talks do they want you to give? What kind of talks? Does it have to be a technical talk? Or can it be about teamwork, about agile work, about software architecture? What does it have to be? What kind of thing are you looking for here? Measurable. One talk, two, three? Give me a number. Don't just be like, it would be nice if I get a bit more public speaking experience. Okay, but how? What? Yeah? Achievable. Obviously, if you're a manager, don't set a goal for 20 talks in a year. Maybe keep it a bit realistic to the person. Relevant. Okay? I think that goes without saying. You don't want to be like, oh, yeah, to get promoted to senior, I want you to bake me a cake. No, thanks. And time bound. By that I mean, yes, you should have these one-year goals, but also you should be making goals in between. If you set ten goals for the end of the year, how many of those do you think will be done after a month? Zero! For most people. Right? For most people, you say, oh, yeah, it's ages away. I don't need to do anything. Right? Time bound.

So if you follow this general pattern, you will find that goals are a lot easier to set. So you should be sitting with your manager, forming a concrete plan and saying, what goals do I need to achieve? By when? In order to get this. Right? Upfront communication. Form a plan together. They know where you're at. If you're scared of saying this to your manager, don't be. I know we've also got the tech lead or team lead conference kind of going on at the same time here, and any of them will back me up in saying, we would always prefer someone come to us and say, I'm looking for a raise in a year or I'm looking for a promotion in a year than someone who says nothing. Because if you say nothing, we have no idea where you stand and we will convince ourselves that you're looking for a new job. So if you like your workplace and you want a promotion there and you want to do work there, tell your manager. They will like hearing this because it shows that you're bought in and you want more. So step two.

Has anyone here heard of a brag bank before? Can I see some hands? A few. Okay. I actually thought it would be more than that. I thought this would be old news, but I'm glad it's not. I get to be the one to deliver it to you. Great.

So, back when I was a singer, it's a hard world. For those who don't know, classical music is not an easy world. I think the music world in general is not easy. A lot of the time people are telling you constantly everything you're doing wrong. All the time. Every day. And one time I got a great review in a newspaper and my singing teacher said to me, save it, put it in a little box in your brain, and the next time you hear bad feedback, you open that box and you bring it out. That's kind of how I think of this. This is like a little bank where you're going to put everything good that you achieve, everything nice someone says about you, every little kudos note that they send your way, everything that you do, you put into this bank.

Human brains are very weird. We tend to remember the negative things very, very strongly. We tend to be very bad at remembering the good stuff. The stuff that goes well or is unremarkable in the moment. What happens is you get to the end of the year and someone says, okay, tell me what you achieved in the last year, and you go, oh God, that feature broke, and then that production problem, and then there was a massive bug that made the website go down for three days. Everyone's thinking about all the bad stuff that happened and it's hard to remember all the good stuff that happened.

So, what is a brag bank? You create a document or some sort of folder, whatever it is, and you collect pictures, feedback, all this stuff. Kudos messages, words of thanks, long references, LinkedIn references, and hot, hot statistics. So statistics, what do I mean? Anything involving a dollar sign is great. Anything to do with percentages, everything that you can actually look at how it had business impact, right? That is what is important. It's not like, oh, I changed the colour of a button, okay, did that lead to anything that you know of? Maybe the button's not a great example, but when you maybe reduced API calls, and that would have saved a bunch of money. Look at that kind of stuff. You need a brag bank. Save everything. LinkedIn references, by the way, the most underrated part of LinkedIn.

Look into that. If you weren't religious before, you are now, because this is your Bible now. If you were religious, this is your second religion now. So you have to have this thing. You have it always. I would say tonight, tomorrow, Monday, go and sit down and try to remember everything you can from the last few months even that went well, that you achieved, that went great, good things people said about you. Look back through your messages. Add it to this document.

Step three. NNQ. This is from my book. As I said, it's not for you guys, but there is something useful in there for everyone, and it is this. NNQ stands for names, numbers, quotes. So you've got this plan with your manager. You're collecting all this great stuff, and then it comes time to actually prove that you've met your goals and that you've done it and that you deserve the promotion. How do you do it? This is how you make the argument.

Names. When I was talking to Sally Jones in Team ABC, she mentioned that a lot of what I'm doing is typically done by a software architect. It's not you saying that. It's Sally. I'm not bragging. It's not me. Sally says that I'm doing the job of a software architect. They can't deny that. It's a fact. It's not you just blowing your own horn. Someone else is backing you up here. Similarly, numbers. After a conscious effort to work on security tickets, the number of flagged vulnerabilities has decreased by 35 per cent, and I've caught four major security threats in review. So they haven't gone to production.

I've caught them. That happened. I did that. It's a fact. It's a number. People can't argue with numbers and they can't argue with what other people have said.

And similarly, quotes, surprise, came from the other direction. I asked on the team and many people felt that they were lucky to have me on a team. This is where the quotes from your brag bank come in, everything nice that people say about you. You put it in there. You say, look, I'm someone people like to have around. I build the team up. This goes back to giving credit, right? I'm someone people want to have around.

So that's how it all comes together, right? You create this smart plan, you build your brag bank, you turn your brag bank into an argument about why you're amazing and why the work you've done is impactful and useful and makes the company money, and then you get the promotion. Yay! And then you do it again, because I guess you're ambitious if you're here, so maybe you just keep going for the next one. So there's a backup plan. I did mention this earlier. The sad fact is, as I said, I'm an optimist but I'm also a pragmatist.

So there's a backup plan. I did mention this earlier. The sad fact is, as I said, I'm an optimist but I'm also a pragmatist.

Sometimes you can do everything right. The market isn't good, the company's cutting staff, there's just no budget for it. This is my life, by the way, in this meme. You get the budget. The manager above you has budget cuts. So they want to give you a promotion. Sometimes the manager's on your side but it's the manager's manager who doesn't know you and they don't even know your work, right? Again, your work can't speak for itself if they don't actually know you or what you're doing. So you need to be making these arguments for all of them. And maybe you do that. Maybe you do everything I've suggested and you're amazing and everyone's great. But I'm sorry it's just not going to happen this year because we don't have the budget. Hmm.

Okay. So there's a backup plan. So this is where I'm going to say managers and team leads, cover your ears. Any of you? Yes. Can anyone just... Yeah, there's one. Okay, good. Cover them up. Yeah, right over. Thank you. Thank you. Quit your job. Right? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I should have opened with that. No. Find a new job. I know it's not as easy as that, right? It's not like you just go, but start looking. Because sometimes it's just not going to happen at that company, right?

The majority of people who are in these top echelon positions have not been working at that company for decades. It happens. But it's not the usual story, right? At some point, usually, there will come a point where you cannot advance further at that company, be it because there are no more positions at that company, be it because the budget doesn't make it happen, be it because the work is not pushing you to expand your skills in a certain way. There are lots of reasons. But if that happens, you have to keep going, right? You have to look out for yourself.

If you really want a promotion and you're doing these steps and it's not happening and it's been like two years and you're going, yeah, it's time. Just let it go. Move on. And then do all this stuff for the job interview process. It works for that, too. But what about neurolinguistic pro? I wanted to bring it back because I thought, maybe there is a tip I can give you, and it is about positive thinking.

And I know I said I wasn't going to talk about it, but I have to. Which is this tip that I give everyone I speak to. Which is that you are the only person who lives with yourself for your entire life. You are a roommate to yourself. And when you think about roommates, or housemates, think about what kind of housemate or roommate you want to be. Are you going to be the kind of roommate who brings yourself down and says, oh, wow, you didn't get a promotion, you must really suck. Or are you going to be the kind of roommate who's like, oh, that sucks, you didn't get a promotion, what went wrong? Let's talk about it, find a new way forward. Be kind to yourself is what I'm saying. You have to be around yourself your entire life. Don't be a shit roommate. Be a good roommate. Be nice to yourself.

Again, this is a quote from me, and again, I put it in quotes, but it looks nice, right? Okay. So my goals were to be useful and to be entertaining. Can I get a round of applause if you think I've done that? All right.

Okay. So thank you. That's the end of the talk. Follow me on LinkedIn, send me feedback, hire me to talk at your events, I accept money, anything like that. And, yes, I have a terrible website you can go to. Yes, I have a book, as I said, it's not for you, but if you have friends or colleagues or something who are trying to break into tech, then maybe it's for them. Thank you so much. And I'll be at the Q&A thingy as well, I think. But do we have questions now, too? Yes, great. Thank you so much! Let's give it up for her one more time!

So the first one is, if you, there are so many questions, and people are up there, and they're moving around, but I'll do this one. Someone's talked about they are a mid-level developer, they've changed jobs quite a few times in the last three years, and they're asking, like, is job hopping detrimental to your CV at some point? Yes. At some point. I would say the earlier in your career, the less detrimental it is, but at some point, if you do want to go from, for example, mid-level to senior, I do believe you have to see the things that go wrong. You can't just be the one implementing stuff, you have to see the growing pains from when you try to expand a piece of software, and things go wrong, and suddenly your code is the legacy code, and you're looking at Git blame, like, who wrote this shit? Oh, wait, it was me! I do feel like you have to have that experience at some point to keep going. That said, it kind of also depends what your goals are. If you are aiming to continue on this technical career path, absolutely. If you're looking to go into management, I mean, maybe not so much. Because then it is more about the team and it is about the people and it is about the processes and maybe it's less about having that experience of dealing with the growing pains of a piece of software from a code perspective. But from a hiring perspective, obviously, if you're hiring someone and you see that they've had six months, seven months, six months, seven months, or something like that, you're going to be thinking, all right, do I really want to hire them and train them and then they're up and running in two to three months' time and then we lose them again. It's not necessarily the way to go.

And this relates to another question, so I'm going to kind of jump to it, which is, you talked about how, yes, it can be bad to just constantly keep drop-hopping, so maybe you do want to build up. But when do you know, okay, this is my red line or this is when I am going to stop and I am going to move on versus I am going to maybe push through because there is a career goal. I mean, that's such an individual question. This is why people hire career coaches. I know Anne Marie is speaking after me and she's a career coach, and this is why people like her exist, right? Because it's different for everyone, so, for example, as a woman, if I'm in a toxic environment where I feel like there's sexism at play, I'm out of there. I'm not going to hang around and be like, oh, my career. No, I'm gone. But at the same time, if everything's going well and you feel like you're being challenged consistently, and, you know, maybe changing jobs will get you a small pay bump but not a huge one, I would argue, like, stick it out and get that experience and, as I said, talk to the manager or the team lead about it and make sure that you're continuously challenging yourself. Take on tickets that are too hard for you right now.

Take on tickets that are too hard for you right now. Like, do that and, like, get good at that because if you just stay in your comfort zone all the time, then you'll struggle. But I do believe that most jobs offer opportunities for growth if you say yes to them and if you challenge yourself actively.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And sometimes managers mostly want you to succeed because they succeed as well. And another question, because what's some advice maybe that you'd give to your younger self? If you could go back in time to maybe before you had all these lessons and you had to just distill it into kind of one factoid, what would you say?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's going to be a surprise to anyone here. Like, fail. Like, fail as much as you can. Learn from your failure. Don't be scared of it. You mentioned earlier my one-year-old. I also have a five-year-old daughter and I often say to her, like, because, you know, little kids, they make a mistake and they get so upset and she's like, oh, you know. And I always say, look, mistakes are fine if you learn from them, you know. And that's something that I really try to instill in her and something that I think I've been pretty good at knowing my whole life, but I feel like there are a few times in my life where it would have been good to have that as a reminder.

So we have another one. And I know some people are asking, like, questions of maybe personal things. So always remember, you can go to the Q&A if you maybe want something that's a little more focused to you. So I'll generalize these a little bit. But this is from a junior who has a few years of experience and they're worried about specializing in something because they don't want to be pigeonholed into something they do not enjoy doing. How can they avoid that? I don't think, I know, I don't mean to dismiss the question asker's feelings on this, but I really do think that's hard as a junior to do. Most of what you're learning as a junior is you're still learning how everything works. If you specialize in one area, probably a lot of what you're learning will actually still be applicable to other areas later and it's really not too difficult to switch. I think once you're kind of mid to senior level, this is a danger that can appear, especially if you really dig deep into one technology or one tool, that can become a problem.

So I'll generalize these a little bit. But this is from a junior who has a few years of experience and they're worried about specializing in something because they don't want to be pigeonholed into something they do not enjoy doing. How can they avoid that? I don't think, I know, I don't mean to dismiss the question asker's feelings on this, but I really do think that's hard as a junior to do. Most of what you're learning as a junior is you're still learning how everything works. If you specialize in one area, probably a lot of what you're learning will actually still be applicable to other areas later and it's really not too difficult to switch. I think once you're kind of mid to senior level, this is a danger that can appear, especially if you really dig deep into one technology or one tool, that can become a problem.

As a junior, I feel like just learn whatever comes your way, learn everything, follow what interests you, follow the opportunities that come up, and usually that will be transferable into other areas of software engineering anyway. There's this wonderful bell curve of how much you know versus how much you think you know. And at first you're like, I think I know a lot, and then you learn a lot, and you're like, oh no, I don't know a lot. So you maybe are not as specialized as you think you are. The Dunning-Kruger effect is real. Look it up if you haven't already. It's definitely true. Awesome.

And then another question as well, because this is when you spoke about talking to your manager figuring out, okay, what do I need to do in order to get to that next level? And good companies often, like you said, have those matrices, but what if the manager and the people above keep moving the goalposts, keeping feedback and plans vague, what could be a course of action? I know one of the answers. Is there anything else or is that the only way? I think you have to go back to that idea of creating a plan, right? You have to really kind of force them to do it. I mean, in the end, we're all people, right? I know that a lot of people, especially juniors, especially younger programmers who are just starting out in their careers, they tend to have this feeling of like, oh, I can't force them to do something. But, you know, we're all people. If someone's not meeting your expectations as a manager, you also need to be telling them this is what I need to stay here, to continue in this job and to keep growing in my role. This is what I need. I need us to be more concrete with this, and I need it to be something I can rely on, and you just be upfront with them about it. You'll have your one-on-ones, and they'll say, how are you going? And you'll be like, well, honestly, I'm struggling a little bit with how I feel like there isn't a concrete plan in place for me in my career. I really just want to come up with something solid. Can we please, pun not intended. I really want to come up with a plan. I want to come up with these goals. I want it to follow the SMART principles, and I want it to have a timeline, and I want us to be able to stick to it. And if they can't do that, then, yeah, you have to start looking around, because in the end, that's a manager's job, is to give you consistency and to protect you from the next level of management, in my opinion. As well, there's another one, which is a quote that I just want to highlight. If you had a manager that talked to you the way you talk to you, you'd quit, so be kind to yourself.

And in this journey, as well, any tips on how people can be kind to themselves and how they can reframe themselves into positive thinking? Yeah, again, I just love the roommate scenario, because it's just, to me, it's just, when you think about it that way, like a roommate, I don't mean to sound negative, but you're never escaping yourself, right? You're always there. So you have to be that person talking to yourself in that way that is positive and actively analyzing how you speak to yourself is important.

Some people like to do, what are they called now? When you say nice things to yourself in the mirror? Affirmations. Affirmations, yes. Some people like to do affirmations, so like, I'm a good developer. And the first time you say it, like, I'm a good developer, and then hopefully as you keep saying it, you go, I'm a good developer, yeah, all right, I'm a good developer. The idea is to keep saying it to yourself in the mirror until you're like, yeah, okay, this is true, I'm in. So I do feel like those can help as well. It's not something that personally works for me, but I know it works for a lot of people, so.

Awesome, I know we are out of time, but where can people find your amazing, and that was their quote, slides. My slides, I mean, I just made them, so I guess, I don't know, do we upload them somewhere? I don't even know. I'll tell you what, I'll put them on my LinkedIn, so if you go to my LinkedIn and follow me on LinkedIn, I'll post them up maybe tomorrow or Monday, and then you can find them all there. Awesome, and you'll be in the speakers Q&A so people can find you and chat to you. Can we give it up for Anna one more time, please? Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.