taking credit

[spacefem]

I wrote an entry last week about how I had to convince my employees to seek credit and claim victory when they finish something, so their accomplishments aren't just lost in the noise. dandylover1 asked... "if she wrote the article, would her name not be on it? Why would someone not seek recognition for a job that he did? That is quite odd."

Oh my gosh. This is how the technical world works. All the time. I have to PULL TEETH to remind my team to report their wins, project completions, finish lines. Every year we have annual reviews where we ask our engineers to remember what they worked on and what accomplishments stuck out, and they HATE it. "I did lots of stuff, leave me alone, I'm too busy!"

One reason we don't seek recognition is that the jobs we do are so collaborative it's hard to draw the line around "I did this great thing." Day 1 as an engineer I was told to take a drawing, change one little connector part number, give it a new drawing number and put my name on it. This did not make me want to brag to my mom that I was an AIRPLANE DESIGNER. I'd just gotten out of school where that kind of assignment is called "plagarism". But in industry it's called "streamlining!" Someone within our company created it, the more I can stand on their shoulders the better. Not only is it faster but the drawing checkers and certification types would get downright mad at me for NOT using a proven design.

Then there's the post-creation workload aspect... the guy who's name was on the first drawing did not WANT to be on the second one because he wanted ME to get the calls and questions from the installers about it. Our company does not put engineer/designer names out on web articles, we want customers contacting the team support lines that are purposefully staffed with people whose job it is to answer questions, that way everyone else can get some work done around here.

And the last reason... there's no black and white measuring stick to tell who's doing a good job, at the end of the year your boss doesn't say "your name was on five articles". We are measured much more objectively. If you're really heads down and don't know much about the organization, you REALLY will not know what's a big important deal and what's not. You are evaluated by people who work closely with you, and they know what you do no matter what name is on it. Today I wrote up a beautiful white paper, my direct supervisor knows I did it, the people who work closest with me know I knock this out, and that's enough. I'm not putting my NAME on the document to be sent around because again, I'd get ALL the questions, ugh!

So that is why technical people will spend entire careers cranking out small changes to existing designs and never pause to think "hey, one of those was a big deal." Have I done some good things at my job? Sure. But I'm past those and on to the next thing, being evaluated on what I'm doing for today's problem... I just keep running.

Comments

[spiffikins]

This whole post totally resonates with me!

In our software company, someone might write a new feature - but 2 other people were involved in designing it, someone else is going to write the database changes to support it, another person will update the documentation to tell users how to use it, someone else will test it to make sure it works - who gets "credit" for it? It's sort of irrelevant.

That doesn't mean we don't cheer individual engineers when they make us cool things or fix bugs - we have one engineer who is like Santa and gives us presents at our dev meetings - he shows us whatever new thing he is building - mostly to get feedback, but we cheer and get excited so he gets his positive reinforcement.

But at the end of the year, we don't have a tally book that says "this person wrote this many features and fixed this many bugs" - we just keep moving forward.

[adafrog]

Very interesting. Do you also work together as a team, or more in an assembly line fashion?

[dandylover1]

Thank you for explaining all of that! It seems odd at first glance, but it makes sense, particularly in relation to not being asked questions by customers, and to only doing a tiny bit on a project.

[siglinde999]

Sounds so much like the public service, but with pictures. It seems all I do any more is approve revisions of documents, put to a new purpose. It is very exciting when you add an entire new paragraph and it survives to become part of a speech or press release.