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by kasey_junk 900 days ago
I couldn’t disagree more. In healthy organizations your manager and your peers can observe your impact and and calibrate correctly.

It’s only on teams and organizations that are disfunctional that such artifacts are useful. If I have to keep a document for this I’m already looking for a new job.
1 comments
shaldengeki 899 days ago
This is really interesting to hear; I work in a team & org that I think is pretty healthy, but I've found the yearly "brag doc" exercise useful for several years running, if only to go through and remind myself of everything I worked on. I consistently find that I've done a _lot_ more than I remember, and that's both a boost and also a healthy opportunity to reflect. The artifact is then useful over the next year as a reminder.

This is in fact the focus of Julia's post (she literally says this early on), and I think it's kind of unfortunate that folks are mostly talking about using the brag doc as advocacy in the performance review process.

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kasey_junk 899 days ago
When the organization is healthy there is no need for a catalog of achievements.

For mental boosts you get affirmation regularly that you are moving the team/product/org in the right direction (or the opposite you recalibrate quickly if you aren’t).

Similarly, reflecting on what has been accomplished is a regular part of the holistic process, not a bespoke individuals task.

If a brag doc is valuable to you personally, great! By all means feel free to build one. But if building one is necessary to excel in an organization that is a very bad sign.

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shaldengeki 899 days ago
Sure - earlier you said "if this is useful that's a really bad sign", and now you're saying "if it's necessary it's a very bad sign", which are pretty different claims. I'm mostly interested in probing the former, so if you're not making that stronger claim then I think we're on the same page.
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kasey_junk 898 days ago
I was responding to this claim: “ but its a red flag if you do this and it has no impact on your compensation or promos”

That implies (to me at least) that the brag doc is necessary to get appropriate recognition externally in the org. That’s a huge red flag. If it provides you personally some internal validation then whatever, that doesn’t say anything about your organization.

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