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Steve Huyhn (aka A Life Engineered ), discusses here , https://youtu.be/oLzj67H-OHo , a few career concepts he says he had to unlearn.

One being about hoping if he does good work, it will surely get noticed.

But he points out thats highly unlikely to happen.

His alternative is to get better at self promoting, starting gently if youre not a natural braggart, highlighting the work of others and then slipping in alongside something you did too, in some email say or chat message.

His other example was emailing daily status updates on a high profile project, he was championing/pushing/shepherding involving maybe a 100 teams. He said if people dont need the daily updatw then they’ll unsubscribe to the mail list.

But cutting up team efforts is tricky

My thoughts are, sometimes, saying “X did A, Y did B and I did C” , can be really tricky, if the effort was a fuzzy collaboration. I think the best alternative I have to achieve what Steve says is just not to collaborate on projects, which is really sad.

Although,…

You can potentially say, “X merged PR1, Y merged PR2, and I merged PR3” as well I suppose and that would be accurate but it might miss some key discussions that maybe all the people had in the trenches , where like I point out in here, https://michal.piekarczyk.xyz/note/2026-01-14-misattribution-error/ , sometimes you think an idea is yours but maybe you misremember or maybe multiple people had the same idea simultaneously because it was simply obvious given the shared context.

There I also suggest that a solution should be to have artifacts for everything.

So maybe –just getting an idea here now– if say you do have a group RFC idea you create a RFC document for, then, just like any research paper, you can write the authors at the top if there are several, and if people comment on your RFC PR, you can have a “Special Thanks " section, thanking them for perhaps even their specific ideas , comments.

But as for the main authors, of a RFC, there, allocating credit to individual ideas might be pointless because as stated above, those details might be too easily misremembered unless literally all conversations and teams chats are recorded but that is probably unrealistic today 😆.

So using emails or chat messages or recorded zoom chats to “lay claim to who ideated this or that”, maybe should only be done with references to the material artifacts, where credit sharing is done fairly as described.

As for steve idea about emailing status, I suppose, being a shephard may be a thankless job indeed, and i kind of want to refer to this other presentation I encountered about being the “glue”, where a person describes how the glue role she plays, empowering people, reviewing their PRs, helping them bounce ideas, promoting their ideas in meetings, being a sounding board, and countless other tasks, will build esteem but carries no artifacts.

I dont remember what was her recommendation but maybe generosity should be the only gain here and selflessness. And not expecting anything in return. So dont spend all your time on gluing, maybe focus more time on artifact building. Make Steve Huyhn proud!

Am I missing anything?