Brag documents
Citation: This idea and content taken and adapted from Julia Evans. Find her original blog post here.
What is it?
Section titled “What is it?”It is a document bragging about all the awesome accomplishments you achieved, big or small! It’s your way to have visibility for yourself (and to show others) what you do and why you’re so awesome.
Why do it?
Section titled “Why do it?”Memory
Section titled “Memory”Instead of trying to remember everything you did with your brain, only at a point in the future when it comes up, maintain a “brag document” that lists everything so you can refer to it!
- When you’re demonstrating your skills with your manager
- When you’re applying for a new internal role
- When you are making a resume for another role
Reflection
Section titled “Reflection”The brag document is useful not just to hype accomplishments, but also to reflect on the work you’ve done. Some questions it can help with:
- What work do I feel most proud of?
- Are there themes in these projects I should be thinking about? What’s the big picture of what I’m working on? (am I working a lot on security? localization?).
- What do I wish I was doing more / less of?
- Which of my projects had the effect I wanted, and which didn’t? Why might that have been?
- What could have gone better with project X? What might I want to do differently next time?
Tracking the fuzzy work
Section titled “Tracking the fuzzy work”A lot of us work on fuzzy projects that can feel hard to quantify or invisible when it comes to just looking at tickets that have been accomplished. Like:
- Improving code quality on the team / refactoring / driving down technical debt
- Being the go-to person for onboarding questions or explaining or giving help on your team
- Giving in-depth and helpful code reviews
- Leading the team in adopting new coding standards
- Being the note-taker or presenter for stakeholders or research
- Volunteering for mini-projects off the context of your team
This kind of work is especially important to put into your brag document because it’s the most likely to fall under the radar!
Encourage yourself and each other to celebrate accomplishments
Section titled “Encourage yourself and each other to celebrate accomplishments”One nice side effect of having a shared idea that it’s normal/good to maintain a brag document at work is that we can create a culture of people encouraging each other to record and celebrate their accomplishments (“hey, you should put that in your brag doc, that was really good!”)
It additionally fosters a culture of pride and celebrating wins. You SHOULD feel proud of the great stuff you learned and the challenges you faced, and this should help normalize feeling that sense of pride in your achievements.
When to do it?
Section titled “When to do it?”Ideally it works best when done in-the moment or on a regular basis, not reflecting on the whole year. Hoping we can build a culture to make this second nature!
Some ideas:
- Collective brag doc quiet working session for 15-20min every 2-3 weeks
- Individuals taking time ahead of monthly 1:1s with your manager to update your doc and share new accomplishments
- Something else?