Hype Docs: Why you need to hype yourself
You are the best person in the world to advocate for yourself.
We hope that you and your loved ones are doing as best as possible, and you are able to find a new rhythm in the face of a global pandemic. As we are just getting started on curating the best software engineering content across the internet, we want to thank you for subscribing to our newsletter.
The job of this newsletter is to curate and collect some of the best resources on the internet that can help you, our reader, on your journey of a fulfilling and successful career in software engineering. What is our motivation to do this? Our main motivation is to share our learnings with you all, gained over a combined 30 years of building software in teams, across India, EU and the United States. Knowledge increases when shared, and therefore, there is also a selfish desire to increase our own learning by learning together.
For the first newsletter, we want to direct your attention toward something called Hype Docs. We learned the idea of Hype Docs for the first time through a former colleague Marie Chatfield Rivas. She wrote a blogpost about it here. We highly suggest that you take a few mins to read the entire blog post. But the quick take away from the post is:
You are the only person with complete insight into everything you do
Hyping yourself isn’t about pride. It’s not about making yourself look better than you actually are
Hyping yourself is about accurately explaining the value that you contribute
A Hype Doc is a running list of all your accomplishments and successes. It’s a place where you keep track of your growth, and regularly jot down the things you’re proud of doing.
The best manager in the world doesn’t have the capacity to know everything you’ve done and (more importantly) doesn’t have all of the context on what you’re proudest of.
A well-maintained hype doc is more than a list of impressive accomplishments, it highlights what’s ‘most you’ and deserves more of the spotlight simply because it’s a set of accomplishments you’re proudest of or worked hardest for.
Our recommendation to you is to start a hype doc yourself, start it today! Once you do, share it with your manager so that they have a transparent view of how things are going. And when it comes time to decide who gets promoted, and if you think there’s enough meat in your hype doc, you can use that as a means of convincing management that you are ready for your promotion!
Let us know what you think about hype docs!