The best advice I ever got from my manager
It had nothing to do with software engineering.
👋 Hey, it’s Stephane. I help engineers become great engineering managers - whether you want to become one or are already leading a team.
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The best career advice I ever got from a manager had nothing to do with software engineering.
This was years ago, not long after I’d moved into engineering management. I’d spent weeks focusing on delivering good work, assuming that if I did my job well enough, people would naturally notice. During one of our catch-ups, my manager challenged that way of thinking.
He told me something along the lines of:
Being right isn’t the goal. Doing great work isn’t the goal either. Those things are just the baseline. The real game is making sure the right people understand the value of what you’re doing, that your ideas actually land, and that you’re part of the conversations where decisions get made.
At the time, it felt a bit cynical.
Now I think it was one of the most practical pieces of career advice I’ve ever received.
And after talking to hundreds experienced engineers and engineering leaders over time, I’ve realised I’m far from the only person who’s come to that conclusion.
Ask anyone who’s been doing this for a while
The interesting thing is that this wasn’t just one manager’s opinion.
I’ve since seen the same advice come up again and again from experienced engineers and engineering leaders.
If you ask people with 15 or 20 years in the industry what the best career advice they ever received was, you’d expect a lot of technical answers. Maybe something about writing cleaner code, designing better systems, or becoming a stronger engineer.
Instead, the advice is usually about people.
Whether you like it or not, influence is part of your job.
You’ll start hearing the same advice as you become more senior:
How people receive your ideas matters just as much as the ideas themselves.
You can be doing great work and still not be visible enough.
Being right isn’t enough if nobody is listening.
This might not be the advice you want to hear, but it’s the advice the most experienced people keep giving.
Why this advice is so hard to accept
I think the reason so many people struggle with this advice is because it feels unfair.
As engineers, we’re taught that good work should speak for itself.
Write clean code. Build useful things. Solve difficult problems. If you do those well enough, people will notice.
Unfortunately, that’s only part of the story.
As you become more senior, your job becomes less about writing code and more about helping good ideas succeed. That means communicating clearly, building trust, influencing decisions, and making sure the people around you understand the value of the work.
It’s explaining your thinking clearly. Sharing progress before someone wonders what’s happening. Building relationships before you need them. Speaking up when you have something valuable to contribute.
None of those things take away from doing good work.
They help good work have a bigger impact.
Surely the answer is just to do great work
I used to think exactly the same.
The problem is that I’ve seen too many examples where it wasn’t enough.
I’ve seen incredibly talented engineers get overlooked because hardly anyone outside their team knew what they were doing. I’ve seen technically excellent projects get cancelled because the people making the decision never really understood their value.
As an individual contributor, you can often focus almost entirely on delivering results because your manager is doing a lot of this work for you. They’re explaining your team’s impact, fighting for resources, sharing successes, and making sure leadership understands why your work matters.
Once you become a manager, that responsibility becomes yours. Nobody is telling your story for you anymore. You’re now telling the story for your team. That’s something that many first-time engineering managers struggle with. They keep trying to succeed using the skills that made them a great engineer, when the role is asking for something different.
Doing the work is still important, but helping other people understand the value of that work becomes part of your job too.
The advice for engineering managers
As an individual contributor, you naturally think about your own visibility. As a manager, you should be thinking about your team’s visibility.
One of your responsibilities is making sure the people outside your team understand the value your engineers are creating.
That means talking about their successes. Explaining why their work matters. Making sure good work doesn’t go unnoticed simply because the people doing it aren’t interested in promoting themselves.
The other part of the job is protecting your team from unnecessary politics. Your engineers shouldn’t have to spend their time navigating organisational disagreements, chasing stakeholders for alignment, or constantly justifying every decision. That’s actually your job.
You need to absorb as much of it as possible so your team can focus on building great software.
Here are three practical ways I’ve found that help:
