The Most Valuable Lesson I’ve Learned 8 Months into My Career

Hi! I’m Jess! People at Slack call me JayZ thanks to my initials and the fact that there are enough Jessicas at Slack to have a whole channel dedicated to the name (#jessicas — we talk about Jessica related things in it, very important stuff). I graduated from the University of Virginia in May of 2017, and started working as an Application Engineer at Slack in July of 2017. I’m currently on the Monetization team, which focuses primarily on driving growth and ensuring the purchasing experience is as pleasant as possible.

One of the main reasons I decided to return to Slack after interning during the Summer of 2016 was because I felt like Slack had the most supportive culture for junior engineers. Whenever I had a question, or needed help understanding how something worked, more senior engineers didn’t hesitate to lend a hand. The assumption was never that the person asking the question was unintelligent or incapable — quite the opposite. I always felt like everyone I interacted with assumed I was capable and competent, and legitimately wanted to help me grow. As someone with a lot of questions, and tons to learn, it was a no brainer to choose to begin my career at Slack.

Suffice to say, thanks to this uniquely supportive culture, in the now 8 months I’ve been at the company, I’ve learned a lot — how to architect database tables for entire systems, the importance and value of typing variables, parameters, and return types (thanks Hack), how to build features to be forward-flexible, etc. Lots of awesome nerd things 🤓. But…

The most valuable lesson I’ve learned in my career so far is how to be my own biggest advocate.

Ever hear of the “just-world hypothesis”? It’s the belief that if you are a good person good things will happen to you, and if you’re a bad person bad things will happen to you. Most people believe this by default, and this line of thinking translates to career success as well. If I work hard, my manager will notice, and I will get promoted. I’m not saying this never happens, but something important to realize is that no one is going to care as much about your own success as yourself. Most managers have multiple people to manage, and are responsible for a wide range of coordination tasks. They just don’t have the time or ability to know about every great thing that you do. That’s not their job — their job is to keep things running smoothly. A great manager should (and will) be an advocate for you — but they should only be the second biggest advocate for you. Wanna guess who should be #1?

It’s your job to be your own biggest advocate. Start paying attention to the things people at your company in more senior roles are doing to move the company forwards, and start doing them.

Step 1 — Track everything you do.

Pro-tip: It takes some time to learn what is valuable to your manager / team / company. You could think that bug fix you did was small and insignificant, but your manager could see it as you taking the initiative to improve the product without being asked — aka, promotion worthy stuff. Also, you may think you’ll remember what you did 2–3 months ago, and that you don’t need to track your daily work, but you won’t remember. Trust me. What’d you eat for lunch two days ago?

Step 2 — don’t be afraid to tell people about the awesome work you’ve done!

At Slack, this can be done via posting in an important / relevant channel about the work you’ve done, or via communicating the work you’ve done explicitly to your manager during a 1 on 1. I usually tend to post when I launch a big feature, or complete a sizable body of work, and I save the smaller things for my 1 on 1.

Isn’t that bragging? I don’t want people to see me as conceited. When I first was told I should be elevating my own work in this way, I shied away from the idea. But it’s not bragging. And your coworkers likely won’t see you as conceited. There’s nothing wrong with communicating the work you’ve done. Chances are communicating the work you’re doing will benefit your coworkers in some way — even if it’s just the simply by letting them know that you fixed something that was broken (so they don’t go trying to fix it themselves). And you get an awesome side effect from promoting your work to your coworkers — you start to be seen and known as someone that gets shit done. That’s a reputation that can float up the food chain.

So, if you’re looking to level up your own career, track your work, communicate your work, and just generally be your own biggest advocate. Make it known that you’re killing it, and leave no doubt that you’re ready for the next step up the ladder 💪.

If you believe in you, others will too.