[onion2k]

Driving the car is surprisingly easy.

If there's a single hack for your career it is simply telling your manager when things happen. Shipped something? Tell them. Broke something? Tell them. Blocked on something? Keep that quiet. No, wait, tell them! Made a breakthrough on something? Tell them. Hit a milestone? Tell them. Got some bad news? Tell them, as early as you can, so they have time to fix things. And so on, for everything. Clear, open communication about the state of things is critical. Embrace stand-ups. Email people first. Put updates in Slack. Write docs. It doesn't matter how you do it so long as you do it.

If you get a reputation for being someone who communicates when things happen you can practically choose your own career path. Every manager will want you on their team. You can boost your way up the org chart or languish in a role so you have time with your kids, and any competent manager will happily and readily support you to do that.

[Negitivefrags]

As a manager, this is 100% the answer. The people who do this are incredibly valuable.

At every performance review I tell all the people who don't do this that they need to do it more. None of them ever do.

For all I can tell, it's an immutable characteristic that 90% of people will never bring something up unless you ask them.

[WhereIsTheTruth]

I have never liked the word "manager" because it's rarely useful in practice, the best managers are actually doers who can cut through the performative transparency and "DDoS attack" of constant updates to see when communication is being used to manipulate or mask failure rather than report progress, because the last thing you want is for your employees to become politicians

[exodust]

Perhaps oversimplified. The manager might not want you tethered to his/her in-box like a puppy on a leash.

"When things happen", sounds risky. You don't want to be drip-feeding emails about individual things as they happen. Perhaps this is obvious, but you'd keep your own notes and try to condense into a nice little list for discussion when you next catch-up.

[onion2k]

It takes some judgement for sure, but that comes with experience. It's far better to over-communicate than under-communicate until you can gauge it yourself so I'd always recommend sharing everything when it happens.

If it's too much your manager can tell you. That's how you get that experience.

[sgarland]

What exactly is the point of a manager if they’re just passively receiving information from their reports?

I long for a flat org structure.

[onion2k]

What exactly is the point of a manager if they’re just passively receiving information from their reports?

The only thing I've said here is that you shouldn't be waiting for your manager to ask for updates. If you read that as me suggesting managers should passively sit around doing nothing except receive reports then you didn't think about it for very long.