97 Things Every SRE Should Know

Chapter 35. Get Your Work Recognized: Write a Brag Document

Julia Evans and Karla Burnett

Wizard ZinesStripe

There’s this idea that if you do great work at your job, people will automatically recognize that and reward you with promotions and increased pay. This isn’t always true! Your manager certainly doesn’t remember everything important you did, and if you reflect on it, even you probably don’t remember everything you’ve done in the past year.

Here’s a simple tactic that can help you get your work recognized: write a document listing your accomplishments. Instead of trying to remember it all, maintain your brag document, which lists everything so you can refer to it when you get to performance review season!

Here’s an example structure:

• Goals for this year (Have you been really focused on security? On building a culture of code review on your team?)

• Goals for next year

• Projects (Explain your contributions and their impact to your company. Numbers are good!)

• Mentoring and leadership work (Include community building and glue work.)

• Design and documentation (Keep design docs and documentation you wrote!)

• What you learned

• Outside of work (Talks! Blog posts!)

This document can be quite comprehensive if you want; 10 bulleted pages for a year of work isn’t too much, especially with ...