Your Commits Aren't Enough

Contrary to popular perception, I’ve never really liked being in the spotlight. I don’t track it, chase it, or think much about how much of it I’m getting.

Which is why it caught me off guard when a colleague recently mentioned how large my LinkedIn following had become. Just over 4,000, apparently.

I started posting during the early days of the pandemic, when my sophomore self was desperate for any scrap of attention that might help secure an internship. I probably peaked during my Dell days.

ince then, I’ve stopped treating LinkedIn as a serious professional platform altogether. If anything, I bulldozed the polite corporate façade and turned it into something closer to a personal blog with occasional shitposts and unfiltered thoughts.

Ironically, the less I tried to be visible, the more durable that visibility became. Somehow the more frank and candid I become in my writings, the more attention it gets. One of the many mysteries of life I shall never uncover its answer.

If there’s one thing I realised in my years of leveraging LinkedIn as a platform to build my personal brand, it’s this: Good work doesn’t carry on its own. Visibility does.

I know some people squirms at the mere whisper of that V-word. It carries a slight hint of negative connotation, thanks to those who bark all the time with no bite. Just being all talk with no substance.

But the reality is that if you don’t actively and consistently make your work visible, you end up being valued only by the one manager who happens to see and appreciate it internally or that one work bestie who you frequently trauma bonds with. It doesn’t take rocket science to know that that’s a fragile position to be in.

Teams reshuffle, priorities shift and budgets get cut. When that happens, your impact often disappears with the org chart, even if the quality of your work never did.

Effort alone is not what creates leverage. Visibility does.

Promotion, opportunity, and influence don’t come from how hard you worked behind the scenes. Hard work is so overrated and oftentimes excessively romanticized. They come from whether your impact is understood by people who weren’t there when the work happened. If your contributions can’t survive a reorg, a new manager, or a changing roadmap, chances are they were never truly portable to begin with.

For the first infant years of your career especially, you almost have to treat showing your work as part of the job. Not as self-promotion, not as bragging rights, but as documentation. Explain what you built. Explain why it was hard. Explain the trade-offs you made, the constraints you were under, and the things that broke along the way. My ex-manager calls it a brag doc.

It can be anything: a short write-up about debugging a production incident, an appreciation post on how you survived an intense project or even a thread explaining a design decision you had to defend.

These kill two birds with one stone: they help others learn, and they make your thinking legible. Over time, engineers who do this build a public track record that compounds. Their past work continues to speak for them, even when they’re not in the room.

Without this, you often get quietly boxed into execution. You become nothing but just the reliable doer and implementer: the person who delivers, but doesn’t decide. You build other people’s roadmaps instead of shaping them. Trusted to ship, but sadly not enough to steer.

Let’s face it: leadership opportunities tend to go to engineers whose judgment is visible, not just their commits. People need to see how you think before they trust you with direction. If all people see is your output, don’t be surprised when you’re never asked for your input.

This isn’t about going viral, or becoming a tin kosong. It’s about consistency. Over time, people begin to associate your name with a domain: reliability, databases, performance, distributed systems, whatever your edge is. That association is powerful. It’s part of the process of building your personal brand and it doesn’t happen by accident.

Here’s the bitter pill to swallow: No one is coming to “discover” you. The industry is loud, crowded, and way saturated with talent—especially now with A.I. being shoved down our throats. If you don’t tell the story of your work, someone else—with half your skill and twice your visibility—will be the one people remember when opportunities appear.

Code is temporary, even more so when Claude can just easily refactor the codebase that your previous staff engineer worked so tirelessly to build from the ground up. Instead, what lasts is the legacy you leave behind: the decisions people can follow, the context they don’t have to rediscover, and the work they can continue without friction.

If your impact disappears the moment you step away, it was never really shared to begin with.

Great engineers write good code, while exceptional engineers make their impact understandable, transferable, and durable.

So don’t just work within the system. Learn how to make your work legible, and start shaping it.