[mhss]

You can have deep knowledge of a given technology, but still not have an understanding of the details of what your reports are doing at some point in time in a given project. The brag document should include enough detail for the manager to understand (e.g PR, design links that the manager can review to assess what you did). It's in your best interest to keep your manager appraised regularly on 1:1s so it's easier for them to catch up and the disconnect doesn't go for a very long time.

[jdudkeidnn]

> still not have an understanding of the details of what your reports are doing at some point in time in a given project

What’s preventing the manager from asking? More generally I think this is handled by standups (really any daily report of “here’s what I’m doing”) or some type of ticketing system.

> The brag document should include enough detail for the manager to understand (e.g PR, design links that the manager can review to assess what you did)

These should all be present in some type of ticketing system / wiki. What’s preventing the manager from using those?

Fwiw, on the other end I think managers are overworked too.

[mhss]

> What’s preventing the manager from asking? More generally I think this is handled by standups (really any daily report of “here’s what I’m doing”) or some type of ticketing system.

Nothing, however the level of detail is different. Daily stand ups are good to spot blockers and "take it offline" when there's a problem. If reports do not raise problems and the manager doesn't smell one, they won't go deep into understanding what you're doing. If you have many reports is hard to go deep into everything every day, particularly if you have a fullstack team or a variety of projects not closely related.

Ticketing system would be ideal if everyone was an stellar communicator, and devs, including myself (and I've been told I am a good communicator by managers when I was an IC) often won't update tickets every day with all the nuance required to understand your work deeply. Managers at large companies also are juggling many things that is impractical to do a full sync with everyone every day (hence the need for weekly or fortnightly 1:1s).

Information contained in a ticketing system also will often be filtered for "public" (anyone in the company) consumption, and there will be information (this other team is being unresponsive on chat and docs and I had to book meetings with them, etc) not reflected there. It may also often contain the 'outcome' of an investigation or status, not how you got there (more verbose communicators may include both, but that's rarely the case) which is also important to assess your work.