The Visibility Paradox: How to Advocate for Engineers Without Turning Into a Hype Machine
Here’s the thing nobody tells you when you become an engineering manager: your job isn’t just helping your team do great work. It’s making sure the right people know your team is doing great work.
Yeah, it feels gross. Self-promotion by proxy. Corporate theater. All the stuff you probably hated about management before you became one.
But here’s what you need to understand: visibility isn’t vanity. It’s currency. And if you’re not spending it strategically, you’re watching your engineers’ careers stagnate while less talented people with louder advocates get promoted ahead of them.
The Wake-Up Call
A manager I know recently tried to get one of his engineers promoted. This person had been at the company 6+ years, consistently delivered solid work, beloved by their immediate team. Easy promotion, right?
Wrong.
Senior leadership had a “bad taste in their mouth” about this engineer. Not because of anything recent, mostly due to projects that failed for reasons completely outside the engineer’s control. Victim of circumstance, not incompetence.
The manager’s frustration: “Everyone on our team loves them. Everyone who works closely with them doesn’t have bad things to say.”
Translation: Being good at your job isn’t enough. The right people need to see you being good at your job.
The Brutal Math of Promotions
Nobody tells you this when you become an engineering manager, but promotions aren’t primarily technical decisions. In all sizes of engineering organizations, they’re political ones.
Not “political” like backstabbing. Political like they require building consensus among stakeholders, managing perceptions, strategic narrative control, and spending social capital wisely.
Persuasion, influence, politics. All the things you probably never wanted to care about in a tech role.
You can have all the performance data in the world. Every metric trending right. But if one senior engineer with a “pretty big voice” in the organization thinks your person underperforms? You’ve got an uphill battle.
I’ve had senior leaders who just hated an engineer on my team. One or two weird interactions. Their mind was made up. “This engineer suuuuuuucks,” worst dev they’d ever seen.
The engineer in question? Actually, really good and ready for promotion to senior.
This is the world we’re operating in. Fair or not, perception shapes reality when it comes to career advancement.
Let’s Get Po-litical, -litical
The political nature of organizations is frustrating. It feels like a waste of time, and the effort spent trying to “Little Finger” your way to a resolution is better spent elsewhere. But it’s an unfortunate reality in many organizations.
So how do you advocate effectively without becoming insufferable? Here are the tactics that actually work:
Name-Drop in Context
The wrong way to advocate: “Jill is doing amazing work, we should promote her.” Weak, vague, non-helpful.
The right way: During a meeting with senior leadership, when discussing a technical challenge they mentioned last week, drop it naturally: “Yeah, you should see the impact Jill’s work is having right now. Not only did she solve [that complex problem you were worried about], she did it faster than we expected, leading to [X Outcome].”
The difference is context. You’re giving your boss the platform and connection to understand how everything ties together. Make it easy for them to digest.
Tactical Tip: Keep a running doc of your team’s wins with context about what leadership cares about. When the right conversation happens, you’re ready.
Expand the Circle of Awareness
If senior leadership has a negative perception of one of your engineers, you need to do the detective work. Figure out exactly who holds that perception, then create opportunities for new, positive interactions.
This might mean getting your engineer invited to cross-functional meetings, having them present technical work to broader audiences (this has worked really well for me), facilitating mentorship relationships with senior ICs, or creating documentation that showcases their expertise.
I mentioned this in a previous post, but pound that pavement. Figure out who you need to talk to for the next milestone.
Seeing Is Believing
When credibility is damaged, direct repair beats advocacy from a distance every time.
Here’s what this looks like: An engineer on one team gets negative feedback from a well-respected senior IC on another team. Rather than defending your teammate from afar or arguing about the feedback’s validity, create opportunities for new, positive interactions between the two.
Have them work together on onboarding, rewriting documentation, mentorship strategies, or greenfield POC. Check in with the senior IC regularly to see how things are progressing.
This works because it creates new positive interactions that override old negative ones. Fresh experiences carry more weight than stale impressions. It also gives the senior IC a stake in your teammate’s success—once someone is mentoring or collaborating closely with your team, they become invested in positive outcomes.
The key insight: you can’t argue someone out of a negative opinion (trust me, I’ve tried). But you can create enough new positive data points that the old opinion becomes outdated.
Control the Narrative Early
Don’t wait until promotion time to start building the case. The groundwork happens months before. Remember those big reveals at the end of Oceans 11, 12, and any of the other resuscitations they did of that series? It wasn’t a smash-and-grab; it was methodically planned.
During regular meetings with senior leadership, casually mention when your engineer is crushing assigned work, running with it beyond expectations. Plant those seeds. Build a pattern of positive associations. Don’t lie, don’t embellish—show the results. Keep them in the conversation, but not as the heaviest part of the discussion.
Think Inception. By the time the formal promotion discussion happens, you want senior leadership to respond with “Yeah, that makes sense” rather than surprise or skepticism.
Think of it like a squirrel gathering nuts for winter. Each small mention, each casual update accumulates. When promotion time comes, you’re collecting on investments you’ve been making for months.
Celebrate Strategically, Not Constantly
There’s a fine line between advocacy and becoming the manager who thinks everything their team does is world-changing.
Doing their job adequately is not the same as being promotion-ready. I’ve made this mistake, and I’ve watched new managers make it too.
Not every pull request merged deserves an announcement. Not every bug fix needs to be broadcast to senior leadership. That kind of noise actually hurts your credibility and makes people tune you out when you do have something important to share.
Instead, make noise when an engineer:
Solves a problem that was already on leadership’s radar
Unblocks another team in a meaningful way
Ships something that moves a key metric the business cares about
Demonstrates significant growth in a skill area they’ve been working on
Use emojis, pick a great GIF, celebrate the win publicly, but focus it on the outsized impact. Something like:
”Yoooooo, Angie just dropped one of the biggest cost-saving changes of the year. With just two lines of code changed, she’ll save us $800k through [insert relevant outcome here].”
Tactical Tip: Track what leadership actually cares about. If they’re not talking about it in all-hands or leadership meetings, they probably don’t care if your team fixed it.
The Moral Conundrum
All of this can feel like performance theater. Like you’re playing a game instead of letting good work speak for itself.
And you’re right. It is a bit of theater, ya gotta give ‘em the ol’ razzle dazzle. Think Silicon Valley meets The Prestige, but with less cloning and no Michael Caine.
Here’s the reframe that helps me: Your job as a manager isn’t to evaluate whether this system is fair. Your job is to help your people succeed within the system that exists.
You can work to change the system over the long term. Push for better promotion processes, more objective criteria, and reduced bias. But while you’re doing that, you still have engineers who deserve to advance their careers now.
A manager I know framed this candidly for their engineer, who was facing a difficult path to promotion. He committed to being an ally, to working hard on the promotion, to being in the engineer’s corner. He’d throw every pitch he could. But he was also clear that the engineer needed to swing at those pitches, build their own promotion packet, advocate for themselves, and maintain their own accomplishments list.
That’s the deal. You can’t guarantee outcomes, but you can guarantee effort and advocacy. You can guarantee support and clear expectations. Most importantly, explain the game that must be played, as gross as it seems.
When Visibility Work Backfires
Not all visibility is good visibility. Here are the failure modes:
Over-promoting weak work. If you’re constantly hyping mediocre contributions, you’ll damage your own credibility. Senior leaders will stop trusting your judgment. When you do highlight something, they’ll discount it.
Creating resentment among peers. If other EMs feel like you’re always grabbing credit or taking up too much airtime, they’ll be less likely to support your people when it matters. Promotion decisions often involve consensus among peer managers.
Neglecting the actual work. Visibility without substance is just noise. Make sure the work actually justifies the promotion you’re pushing for. No amount of strategic communication can paper over weak performance. This is the “outcomes over “They completed 80 points this sprint!” “Did the work have any impact?” “Uhhhhhhhh, no.” 😬
Ignoring your team’s preferences. Some engineers genuinely don’t want visibility. Some don’t even want to be promoted, and that’s okay. Your job is to advocate for their career goals, not impose your vision of success.
The Meta-Game
While you’re doing all this visibility work for your team, you’re also establishing your own reputation as a manager.
When you advocate effectively—thoughtful about timing, strategic about channels, accurate about capabilities—you build trust with senior leadership. You become known as someone who develops people effectively, has good judgment about talent, delivers results consistently, and can be trusted with bigger teams and harder problems.
This compounds over time. The better your reputation, the more weight your advocacy carries. The more weight your advocacy carries, the easier it becomes to get your people promoted. The more success you have getting people promoted, the stronger your reputation becomes.
Round and round we go.
Look, I get it. We all want to live in a world where great work speaks for itself. But that’s not how most organizations run.
Great engineering managers are great translators. You translate technical work into business impact. You translate individual contributions into team success. And you translate quiet excellence into visible career advancement.
Is it uncomfortable? Yes. Is it gross? Sometimes. Is it necessary? Absolutely.
Your engineers are counting on you to do the one thing they often can’t do effectively for themselves: make sure the right people see them winning.
What’s your approach to visibility work? Have you struggled with the balance between advocacy and authenticity? Drop it in the comments.