Get your manager promoted. Traits to become a great Software Engineer, vol. I

The fastest way to advance in your career as a software engineer? Get your manager promoted. Cynical? Not really. Your success and your manager’s are fundamentally intertwined. If they look good, so do you.

Before we dive in: I wrote this myself. No AI—all em dashes in this post have been willingly used by me. Apparently this needs clarification nowadays. Dystopian, if you ask me. Anyway.

Why being a React or Python expert won’t cut it

I strongly believe that the most impactful skills you can have as a software engineer have nothing to do with being an expert in any specific piece of technology. This is even more noticeable nowadays—where AI is democratizing technical knowledge—effectively shrinking the bridge between technical and non-technical folks.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t invest time in improving your technical expertise, but that will only get you so far. I like to think about technical expertise like tools in your toolbox, but tools won’t do you much good unless you know how, when, or for what to use them.

Hard skills are great to get shit done. And that’s extremely valuable, but why settle there?

How to actually get your manager promoted

Your job—whether it’s explicit or not—is to make your manager successful. This is not about buttering up anyone. It’s about going beyond what’s assigned to you.

You’ll deliver your tickets and initiatives—that’s the baseline—but promotions happen when someone consistently operates above expectations. What this means in practice: figure out what needs to be done that isn’t being done, figure out how to do it, and most importantly—actually get it done. Spot the gaps nobody asked you to fill and fill them anyway.

The easiest way to do this is probably tackling tech debt. That functionality your neighbor team keeps breaking after every release? Test added. That complex query older than the most veteran employee in the company? Refactored. Your manager now gets credit for a more stable system.

Another way is to empathize with the user and find small UX improvements that can deliver a lot of impact. Put yourself in the user’s shoes and understand where they struggle. Something as simple as adding a search box next to a long list of items can go a long way. Your manager could then point to improved user satisfaction metrics.

A very powerful one is to find shortcuts. There’s nothing that will make you—and specially your manager—look better than delivering ahead of time. If you have a strategy to deliver the same feature, with the same amount of impact, in a shorter span of time, you just found gold.

We once found a way to deliver a one-and-a-half month initiative in barely a week, by finding a way to reuse parts of the code that initially were thought to be built from scratch. Do that, and your manager will look like a genius for hitting deadlines early.

Ask for forgiveness, not permission

You may already be willing to put these into practice, but you might also feel there’s no time for them. Usually teams have a pretty packed roadmap with higher priorities.

If that’s the case I’d—first and foremost—challenge the roadmap. If you’re able to properly sell why you think all these improvements are a necessity, most capable managers will figure out a way to slip them into the roadmap.

Sadly, this will not always work out. In that case, just don’t ask for permission. And I mean it. If you have some downtime—maybe you closed a ticket early, or are waiting reviews from your peers—work on these instead of letting your manager know you don’t have stuff on your plate.

Tread lightly though, you need to be sure you’re doing impactful work without delaying whatever the team has committed to deliver. In the same way nothing makes your manager look better than delivering ahead of time, nothing will make them look worse than false promises. Also, don’t try this on your first week.

What’s in it for me?

When your manager succeeds, you typically benefit directly. You might become the natural successor for their role or you get pulled into bigger projects and higher visibility work.

Make someone successful and they will remember. They will advocate for you. They will create opportunities for you. They will find a way to promote you if it’s in their hands.

Ever seen engineers that aren’t the best coders advancing fast? They’re the ones who understand that success is a team sport—and that helping your manager win is how you position yourself to win too.