I hustled for six months. The promotion went to Fedya, who just talks in meetings. Why?
When I was at Alibaba, a developer walked into our 1:1 and said: "I've been grinding for 6 months and the promotion went to Fedya, who just talks in meetings. What the hell?"
I was taken aback for a second.
Then: the guy genuinely had worked hard. I knew that.
Then: as his manager, I couldn't recall a single meaningful thing he'd shipped in 6 months.
Sound familiar?
Here's the uncomfortable part: most engineers treat visibility as a "dirty game." I'm writing code here, not playing politics. But there's a strange pattern. The people who hate office politics the loudest are often knee-deep in it. They're just doing it badly.
The classic version: Alyosha despises the "corporate world," prides himself on "just writing code." Meanwhile he vents about team decisions over beers, skips meetings (camera off when he does show up), and plays the introverted-engineer-who-just-needs-to-be-left-alone character.
That's also politics. Just ineffective and quietly corrosive.
After that conversation, I started thinking about what to actually do about this as a manager.
1/ Accept that politics exists
In any group over 10 people, politics is present. Not good or bad, just real. Your job isn't to pretend it doesn't exist. It's to help your team navigate it in a healthy way.
2/ Teach the team to show their work
Austin Kleon's Show Your Work! has 2 ideas I actually use:
Think process, not product. Show how you got somewhere, not just the finished thing. What tradeoffs did you make? What didn't work? A developer spent 2 months on a database migration. Demo day: "It's done." Nobody understood the scale. He could have posted weekly to Slack: "Realized the old approach won't work, here's why." By the end everyone would have known he was doing something genuinely hard.
Teach what you know. Understood something? Teach others. A guide, a workshop, explaining it to a junior. Teaching automatically creates interest in your work and raises visibility organically.
3/ Give feedback in real time
If you wait until the performance review to tell someone they're invisible, you're 6 months too late.
Bad pattern: developer spends 6 months on a complex feature. Silent at dailies, always "all good." Gets an average rating at review because nobody understood the scope, including you. Then the sequence runs: Demotivation, Resignation, Hiring. You've lost a good person and paid full recruitment cost.
Come to them early: "I don't fully understand what you're building. Walk me through it?" Then figure out together how to make the work visible. Noticing this proactively is harder than having the conversation. But that's the job.
4/ Build infrastructure for visibility
Don't wait for introverts to start self-promoting. It won't happen. Embed visibility into the process natively.
Demo Fridays: 30 minutes every week. Anyone who wants to show anything, shows it. No slides required, zero barrier to entry. Critical: leadership needs to attend. When the CTO says "nice, that's interesting" it lands harder than anything you say. Do not make engineers do presentations.
#team-releases channel: normalize dropping even small things. At first everyone resists, "it's nothing," "I don't want to brag." So I lead: "@Gleb, thanks for handling that incident last night — resolved in 20 minutes while everyone was asleep." 30 seconds of my time. The person feels seen. The team sees it. Train your tech leads to do the same.
5/ Watch for the race
Visibility can curdle into competition where who shouts loudest wins, not who does the best work. That kills a team from the inside.
Warning signs: engineers cherry-pick visible tasks and dump the unglamorous ones onto others; people compete for demo time; someone posts trivial updates to the channel daily, clearly just checking a box.
Bottom line
Visibility isn't a dirty game. It's a skill. My job as a manager isn't to pretend politics doesn't exist. It's to build a system where good work gets seen. Because if I can't remember what someone did for 6 months, that's not their failure. It's mine.
Stay tuned 🥷🥷🥷