How do I get noticed without self-promoting obnoxiously?

Efri · 1 min read

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Same reframe as marketing. You're not promoting yourself. You're making your work visible.

Those feel identical from inside and they're completely different from outside. Nobody minds hearing what you built. What people find obnoxious is claiming to be great, which is a different activity entirely.

So:

Report on the work, not on yourself. "Here's what we shipped and what it did." Facts, not adjectives.

Share it while it's happening,. not as a summary at review time. Progress is interesting. A retrospective list of your achievements is a performance.

Credit other people, generously and specifically. People who share credit get talked about far more than people who take it.

Be useful in public. Answer questions, help people, write the doc nobody wanted to write. That builds a reputation without a single claim about yourself.

Say what you're working on when asked. Half of being invisible is answering "busy, you?" every time someone asks.

The people who are genuinely insufferable are the ones talking about themselves. If you talk about the work, you're just informing people. That's the job.