Be more than just a green dot

There’s something telling about the way modern remote work has changed us. You’re not a person anymore — you’re a dot. A green dot in Slack or Teams or whatever your company uses. And people look at that dot. More than they’ll admit.

I’ve been asked — by managers, directors, even other EMs — “hey, have you seen that person? They don’t seem to be online. Do you know if they’re working today?” And although we might be working remotely people are still somehow tied to the nine to five shift. Of course we should be focused on outcomes not facetime. We need to make sure things are shipping, and teams need to be healthy to do that. But still people focus too much on if the dot is green.

That’s where we are. And honestly, it makes sense. We used to see each other. In an office, you could watch someone jump from meeting to meeting, help a colleague, whiteboard something, offer an idea in a corridor. You had constant, physical evidence that people existed and contributed. Now you don’t. Most companies have embraced remote work and genuinely benefit from it — but a lot of them haven’t let go of that old need to see people. So they look at the dot instead.

Which means that if the only time your manager actually interacts with you is a 30-minute 1:1 — once a week if you’re lucky, sometimes it might be every other week, sometimes once a month — then you, as a person, as an engineer, as someone doing real and important work, are essentially invisible.

The thirty minutes are not even necessarily well spent as some of that time is operational, some of it is personal, some of it your manager might be distracted, or might be sharing some information because they have to. Thirty minutes isn’t enough to talk about all the progress and contributions you have made, let alone if you need to cover six months of work prior to a calibration session. Thirty minutes is barely enough to cover one cycle.

So here’s the real question: if nobody sees what you’re doing, does it mean you’re not doing it?

I learned the answer to this the hard way. And it led me to something I now consider one of the most valuable habits in my career — and something I push hard for everyone on my team to do.

My near-miss

A while back, while I was tech lead for one of my teams, I was trying to do the best I could for that team. I would handle every ad hoc request that came in, I absorbed them so the team didn’t have to context switch. Every Slack message aimed at the team, I jumped on. Every triage ticket, every fire. I was the shield. The team was shipping, incidents were down, things were running smoothly — and I was proud of that.

The problem was that I was the only one who could see it.

Then I had an emergency operation and was out sick for about a month.

After a couple of weeks of being back there was a calibration. And my EM — who genuinely knew what I’d been doing, who had seen the team improve, who understood my contributions — was scrambling. She was trying to gather evidence for six months of work, with me barely back from sick leave, and neither of us had it written down anywhere.

At that point my PR contributions were slightly below the other tech leads, because I had been out sick. Everything else that I was doing wasn’t easily visible in Linear. A lot of it lived in Slack threads, in decisions made in meetings, in things I’d caught before they became problems.

I spent days going through old Slack messages, digging through PRs, looking for any thread where someone had said something positive about my work. It was exhausting and humiliating and it wasn’t enough.

She came to me and said: Chris, I know you’re doing a great job. I can see it in the team. No incidents in months. The team is shipping. There are no problems. But I cannot show this like I would like to.

My job was in jeopardy. Not because I wasn’t doing the work but because I couldn’t prove it.

She went out on a limb for me, and I will always be grateful for that. She got me six weeks to prove the calibration wrong. And I did. But I also decided, right then, that I was never going to be in that position again. And now as an EM I don’t ever want any member of my team to be in that situation either.

That decision changed how I work. And this post is about that.

Why visibility is harder than it should be

Here’s the thing — even with the best manager in the world, staying visible is genuinely hard. Not because anyone is failing. Just because of the math.

A typical EM has eight, ten, maybe twelve reports. Memory isn’t selective because of malice — it’s selective because there’s too much to do. Managers remember the last four to six weeks. They remember the recent things and the big things. Everything else gets lost. So if your calibration covers the six months and your manager is trying to advocate for you from memory alone, they’re already fighting an uphill battle — even if they want to help you.

There’s also bias. I know nobody wants to say this out loud, but managers are human beings, and human beings sometimes have favorites. Sometimes it’s unconscious — an EM with backend experience might just feel a natural affinity with backend engineers. Sometimes it’s just personality. And if for whatever reason you and your manager don’t click, you can’t rely on them to go out of their way to remember your contributions.

And then there’s credit. Most of the teams I’ve worked in were genuinely good about this — people gave credit where it was due. But that’s not always the case. Ideas get floated, ideas get picked up, and sometimes the credit lands on a different name. It happens. And when it does, another piece of your contribution quietly disappears.

Add to this: what if you’re not customer-facing? No one’s emailing your manager to say you were brilliant. What if you’re not always leading projects, but you are still contributing to them? What if you’re an introvert and announcing your wins in a public channel feels genuinely uncomfortable? What if you’re fully remote and most of the company has never seen your face? None of this means you’re not contributing. It just means your contributions are not automatically visible. And that’s the real issue.

It’s not fair, I know, but it’s real. That’s why we all need something to level the field, something that can help us. The use of a brag document does exactly that. Ok, so maybe it doesn’t level it completely but it puts evidence front and center even when you’re not there in the room during the calibration session. It’s hard to forget or overlook the evidence when it’s written down.

A brag document fixes that. First and foremost for you — so you remember exactly what you’ve contributed. And then for everyone else — because faced with written evidence, it’s a lot harder to overlook someone.

What a brag document actually is

It’s simpler than it sounds. A running document — just for you — where you record your contributions as they happen. Things you shipped. Problems you solved. Colleagues you unblocked. Feedback you received. Mentions in public channels. Decisions you influenced. Even the small stuff. And especially the unspoken scorecard — the incidents you jumped on, the interview loops you participated in, the PR you raised to fix something in another team’s codebase. The things that show up in calibrations but that nobody explicitly tells you to track.

Not a performance review. Not a LinkedIn summary. Just evidence. Yours. Written by you, updated in real time.

And that last part matters more than people realise. The temptation is to fill it in before calibration — two weeks of furious writing trying to reconstruct six months of work. I’ve done it. It doesn’t work. You forget the Slack message where someone thanked you publicly. You forget the incident you quietly prevented. You forget the three hours you spent on a Wednesday afternoon unblocking a junior colleague.

Update it when it happens. Right then. You got a compliment in a public channel — write it down. You shipped something — write it down. You helped someone — write it down. A week later you’ll half-remember it. A month later it’s gone.

And write down the small things too. Especially the small things. Consistent contributions documented over twelve months are far more powerful in a calibration than a flurry of big things in the last two weeks. What you’re building is a record of consistency — and that’s what actually moves the needle.

The bonus nobody talks about

There’s also an unexpected benefit to keeping a brag document that doesn’t get talked about enough: it’s one of the best tools I know for managing imposter syndrome.

When you record your contributions consistently, you build a tangible, honest record of what you’ve actually done. On the days when you feel like you’re not doing enough — and we all have those days — you can open that document and see the evidence firsthand. It’s hard to argue with your own receipts.

And if you notice a genuine gap, something you’re expected to be doing but haven’t covered, you know exactly what to work on next. No surprises at calibration time. No manager having to point it out. You see it yourself and you act on it. That kind of self-awareness is what separates people who grow intentionally from those who grow accidentally.

Believe me — seeing all the work you’ve done, written down in one place, feels genuinely empowering.

Who should write it

You. Not your manager. You.

I write one myself. And I tell everyone on my team to write one — because I’m honest with them about the reality: I have bad memory, I’m constantly context switching, and if they don’t write it down, I will miss things. Good things they deserve credit for.

This isn’t about distrust. Even if you have a brilliant Manager who knows your work and would go to the mat for you — can you honestly expect them, while jumping between meetings and incidents and their own responsibilities, to keep a detailed running record of every contribution you make? Would you bet your review on that?

Write it yourself. Share it with your Manager. Make their job of advocating for you as easy as possible. You’re not showing off — you’re making sure the work you’re doing is visible. The unglamorous work. The work nobody sees. The work that, without a record, is like it never happened.

Because you did it. You should get credit for it.

The green dot is not enough. Be more than the dot.