Visibility

I’ve received the following question on Visibility;

– “I’ve been running a study group. Recently, one of my colleagues who just joined the club decided to organize another similar club, and he involved the managers as well. I feel like the new club he started has turned into a place where my colleagues will try to seek visibility from the manager as the manager will probably put this on the next update with VP that this guy runs the club etc. Is this the right move to advance the career?”

Visibility is an area most engineers have a hard time with. It’s easy to forget and it’s more comfortable to not put extra effort to increase visibility. But it’s critical as it helps others build a good perspective of you and your work. Something that’s not visible to others simply doesn’t exist for them.

In this scenario, if the efforts were put to make a few posts about hosting a study group, topics that are planned to be discussed, what were the top learnings etc., this would;

• Increase visibility
• Help others learn from your efforts
• Give others a chance to join the group
• Create a written catalog people can search for and find who would be the best person to contact for a certain topic

How can you increase your visibility?

• Sharing status updates
• Commenting on public posts
• Being active on design documents
• Commenting on people’s code reviews
• Avoiding answering direct messages by either asking for them to make a post, or after answering someone directly, extracting the answer into a post yourself

– Always focus on visibility and favor written forms of communication.