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I am a Software Developer in Germany, and have this quite style of working. I do my tasks and at times, even more than what is expected of me. But in meetings, I don't speak much about my work. I answer to the point, when a question is directed to me. Many colleagues take advantage of this, and take credit for the work I did. I even got a bad rating for this once. My team leader did not WANT to see the things I did. Instead, he was interested in giving a better rating to people who communicate or sell their work via talk. So, I received a relatively bad rating. Even after the rating when I received the opportunity to highlight my work, the TL was not ready to see the good work I did.

So my question is,Is this normal these days? Do managers expect "song and dance" style of communication rather than non-verbal communication like Email? Are there employers who actually do an objective assessment of your work?

Anon
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    Does this https://workplace.stackexchange.com/a/145881/64920 answer your question? – Jeroen Jul 13 '21 at 11:01
  • @Jeroen Unfortunately not, sure there are some things that overlap, but it does not answer my question. – Anon Jul 13 '21 at 11:27
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    The nature of the current system is that almost everything has become about theatre rather than substance. – Steve Jul 13 '21 at 11:29
  • You already mentioned what may be the most important point: "he was interested in giving a better rating to people who communicate ". So you know that communication is important to him. This is not unreasonable. If you know what your boss is looking for, and you want to do well in the job, see how you can provide it, in your own way. It might be better if your boss asked questions and tried to bring you out, but most managers are not stars, they are regular people who progressed to this job, usually without much training. Help him appreciate you. – Basya Jul 13 '21 at 19:54
  • @Basya Well I'm sure I'm better at written communication than verbal communication. So, if someone wants to see that he/she will see it. – Anon Jul 14 '21 at 05:06
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    Does this answer your question? Why is it important to gain "visibility" in the workplace? – Philipp Jul 16 '21 at 11:12
  • @Philipp Actually no, my question is different. – Anon Jul 16 '21 at 12:00
  • @Anon Well, I believe that that question and the answers to it are exactly the advise you need. I hope my answer can show you why. – Philipp Jul 16 '21 at 13:18
  • Are you telling your managers at all what you are doing or do you expect them to read through your git commits? – Helena Jul 17 '21 at 20:51
  • @Helena My emails should be sufficient to let them know about my work. If a Manager has something against you he will see what he wants to see. And I will leave for a remunerative opportunity. Also, my manager has done technical stuff before, so if he wants to objectively assess my work and does not want to believe data from my verbal communication, yes, i expect him to look at my commits. – Anon Jul 18 '21 at 17:42

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Is this normal these days?

Pretty much, yeah. And it's not just "these days" - this has been the case for a very, very, long time. I'm not saying you need to brag and certainly not that you should claim credit for anything you haven't done but ensuring your work and effort has visibility is definitely a good thing to do.

Is it wrong to expect my employer to see what I have actually done rather than what I talk ?

It's "wrong" in the sense that it's incorrect - employers can't always see your output, and having the time or inclination to be directly shown technical work isn't something you can rely on your managers to have.

My team leader did not WANT to see the things i did. Instead, he was interested in giving a better rating to people who communicate or sell their work via talk. So, I received a relatively bad rating.

This communication and "selling" of work is what we call a "soft skill", it doesn't come naturally to everyone, but most people can learn to do it. I'm not the most socially gifted of folk and it was something I struggled with earlier in my career and while I'll never be the best at it the work I've put in to improve that has paid dividends.

Are there employers who actually do an objective assessment of your work?

You might be able to find and employer who is more so than your current one - but you're never going to eliminate that subjective element entirely. We're subjective creatures by nature, and what's more software development isn't a type of work that lends itself well to objective, quantifiable measures of performance. And most of the one's that try are either approximations at best or downright awful at worst. Try having your performance measured by lines of code produced or number of code commits and you'll see what I mean.

But you're going have a much, much more successful time and a far wider pool of potential employers if you learn to communicate your achievements better.

Would it be great if managers could magically know exactly how much work you'd put it and how much you'd achieved? Sure, I'd absolutely love that - both as a manager and as a subordinate. But here in the real world it doesn't work like that I'm afraid.

motosubatsu
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  • So basically, everyone has to make a song and dance and act like a clown to get a good rating. I would rather invest my energy in something more meaningful in life. If i get to a manager position someday, i would not ignore a quite but good worker. I don't understand why its wrong of me or anyone else to expect it. – Anon Jul 13 '21 at 11:58
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    @Anon looking from the managers perspective. How are they suppose to know you are a good worker if you don't share what you have done or hear of the work you do from you or someone else. Soft skills are an important skill in a developers skillset nowadays it is not an "sit alone in the basement" job as it more were many years ago. I would argue that the social aspect is very important as a developer today – novafluff Jul 13 '21 at 12:09
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    It's only wrong to expect people to magically know what you've done. Donating anonymously is great for charity and if it makes you feel good about yourself, but if you want other people to feel good about what you did, you'd better tell them about it, because how else would they know? – Erik Jul 13 '21 at 12:43
  • @Erik Just look at the relevant tickets and the linked git commits. I think one does not even need a High school degree to assess work objectively, that way. If this is not a possibility, then, one would need to do things to seek attention. Otherwise, git commits and linked tickets should be enough. – Anon Jul 13 '21 at 12:48
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    @Anon non-technical people don't even know what git is, let alone what it's for or how to judge whether or not the contents of a commit are valuable. Even as a technical user, figuring out how good a programmer is by their git-commits only would take weeks, and then I'd still only get a very small part of the picture. You sound like you've never actually tried to judge a programmer's skill this way before. – Erik Jul 13 '21 at 12:50
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    @Anon - I don't think anyone is saying that you need to do a song and dance and act like a clown. But you do need to communicate. Communicating well is a very important part of most jobs, even technical jobs. You need to communicate what you are doing, what problems you encounter, etc. You need to communicate with others about the project itself. If "quiet" == "doesn't communicate", you are unlikely to be appreciated, and perhaps with good reason. If "quiet" == "soft, brief communication", can be OK. Talk with your boss and clarify what kind of communication he needs or wants from you. – Basya Jul 13 '21 at 19:52
  • @Basya I don't think it matters what he wants from me, in order for me to get a good rating. I could not care less about him as a person. And at the end of the day, he has to choose someone in the team to give a bad rating, right? – Anon Jul 14 '21 at 05:09
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    No, why would he have to have at least a bad employee? – Basya Jul 14 '21 at 08:03
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The bane of a developers existence is the answer to this: Document everything. When it comes time for the evaluation where you need to show what you've done, then you present your documentation, and don't take "I don't want to hear it" for an answer.

In the corp. world you have to be good at selling yourself. That doesn't mean you have to brag, but you do need to be able to make people see that you're doing your job properly. Not talking in meetings is fine (I don't.), as long as you're getting your technical information out there ("I completed stage 2 of this project, I am moving on to stage 3" for example) with any questions answered if asked.

This seems more like a managerial problem than a "you" problem. They should be addressing the actual productivity and not the sales pitch for what you've done. That said, get good at talking. It'll help your career in some capacity at some point!

SliderBlackrose
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This is common in places that don't value technology as a core strength. I used to work for a large bank and you definitely needed to be able to sell your work and describe your contribution in business terms.

However after moving to a scale up with strong engineering culture things were very different. Talking about how to configure a system would be considered strategic / managerial since it had an impact on skills we would hire for. Stuff like that would have been dismissed as too much technical detail at the bank.

Also no one at the bank would ever review code. It was all docs and PowerPoint. But in the scale up, code review was a big deal. I'm a manager now and quality of pull requests is definitely the primary way I would judge people that report to me.

Having said that, even in places with good tech culture, you will be judged on soft skills as you progress. However this is not the same as being a businessy type. As an individual contributor (a role the large bank didn't have) you would do stuff like write proposals why technology A should be used. Mentoring junior team members and coaching on best practices.

In your current work try to see it as an opportunity to practice your "business pitch skills". Longer term maybe you can find a more tech focused role that values you for simply being technically good.

plagiarisedwords
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I am a foreigner software developer in Germany since heck a lot of time.

Also I am suppressed on the meetings, but on a different reasons. My language skills are not enough.

However, German is different. Here the bosses are tracking your work behind the bars. This is the country custom. They do not have only superficial info from your work details, they are regularly talking with your co-workers, leads, and check all the other traces of your work. They do it silently, but believe me: before every überweisung of your salary, someone will check, at least superficially, what you actually did for that salary. For example, they check your git log, your jira activity history and Stundenschreibung. And these must match. Never allow too much inconsistency in these, they have well-trained customs, what to look for, and you do not know its details.

However, this also means, that they have a clear picture about your actual activites, and it is an independent source from your meeting activity impression.

In other countries, it is different. There the bosses see mostly the result.

If you talk little, it has three disadvantages:

  1. It looks that you are trying to withhold your knowledge. Obviously it is not a positive thing for a boss wanting to optimize his team productivity. So, try to teach them!
  2. You give up your saying to make things better. Is there really nothing in your team what should be done better? No, I do not believe it. Then say it!
  3. It does not matter, how good are you. What for a boss matters, how your work affects the total productivity of your team. They won't keep you if they would need to fire half of your team to keep your job.

Suppression on meetings happened also the me very often. What I do against it:

  1. Even if you feel suppressed, try to say what you can. It is important for the team lead / scrum master / anybody to integrate you, they will notice it and help you, even if you do not see it. Trying is nearly so good as if you actually could do it.
  2. Beside the meetings, there are always secondary channels. Company chat, mails, so you can so or so integrate by making in two-person out-of-meeting communication, for which you should have used the meeting.
Gray Sheep
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  • This is the answer i have been looking for, because, you have mentioned things that resonate with my situation. – Anon Jul 18 '21 at 17:39
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Yes, this is normal. When you want to be successful in most workplaces, then it is not just important to do a good job, but also to make people aware of you and your work. This is further explained in the question "Why is it important to gain “visibility” in the workplace?".

You can not expect the managers above you to recognize your contribution on their own. They are primarily concerned with results. Fairly assigning praise and reward for those results is only a secondary concern. So you can not rely on your managers to take the time and energy to see past the dazzlers and find out who is actually responsible for the results. They have better things to do with their time.

This is especially true in disciplines like software development where it is very difficult to assess the true productivity of employees using objectively measurable metrics. Assembly line workers can be rated by number of correctly assembled widgets. Sales people can be rated by revenue. But how do you measure the performance of software developers? Lines of code written? Number of bugs fixed? Number of finished user stories? All those can be highly misleading, because they barely measure quantity and say nothing about quality.

In the absence of any truly objective metrics, managers trying to assess employees have to trust their gut instinct. And that gut instinct is affected a lot by image and exposure of the employees.

So when you do something good, then make sure you are the one people connect to that achievement. Try to be the one who:

  • Sends the emails talking about it
  • Calls the meetings about it
  • Presents in those meetings
  • Has their name on the documents about it
Philipp
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  • Why exactly is number of finished user stories misleading? If user stories are finished before the deadline, it should be regarded as something positive. If it has my name on it and the relevant commits are also linked. And I do communicate with emails. – Anon Jul 18 '21 at 17:48
  • @Anon The reason is that not all user-stories are created equal. So simply counting them is not an objective assessment of productivity. Would you feel treated fairly if you completed one user-story which required to understand and solve a lot of complex problems and a huge amount of code to be written while your colleague completed three user-stories in the same time which were all pretty trivial to implement? – Philipp Jul 18 '21 at 17:51