show your work

there's a book by Austin Kleon called Show Your Work. it's made for artists and writers, all sketchbooks and studios and process. on the face of it, nothing to do with a career spent in front of a terminal. i think it might be one of the most useful career books an engineer could pick up, and almost none of them ever will, because the cover looks like it belongs to someone else.

the idea at the heart of it runs against the grain of how most technical people are raised. do the work, keep your head down, let the work speak for itself. Kleon's reply is gentle but firm. the work doesn't speak for itself. somebody speaks for it, and if you leave that seat empty it gets filled by whoever happens to be loudest.

i've watched this play out for seventeen years. the best engineer on a team, the one holding the whole system together, passed over at review. not because the work wasn't there, but because nobody in the room could describe it. it lived in a repo, a ticket queue, a system that only became visible the day it broke. from where the decisions get made, invisible and non-existent look the same.

document, don't perform

the thing i love about Kleon is that his answer isn't self-promotion. he's not asking you to shout. he's asking you to document, which is a far more comfortable thing. you show a little of the process instead of hiding all of it. the rough version, the wrong turn, the fix and why it worked. you already have every bit of it. you lived it.

so you share something small, and often. and i can tell you it works, because i stumbled into it myself.

what it looked like for me

after i read the book, i set up the most basic email i could. it went to seven people inside my company, people i knew would care about the things we were getting done. i sent it every three weeks. no strategy, no plan. today it goes to over two thousand two hundred people, inside an organisation of fifteen thousand.

the number is the least interesting part. what i watch is the replies. i still have no clean way to track opens or clicks, and that used to bother me, until i realised the volume of people writing back to say they love it is all the proof i need.

the thing they say most is that it's a pleasure to read. which is funny, because all i do is talk. no clever words, no literary gymnastics, no artificial intelligence anywhere near it. i speak into a microphone, let it catch my thoughts, clean it up afterwards, make the whole thing lowercase, and hit send. this piece you're reading was made the same way.

plenty of people would call that lazy. i've made my peace with it, because in a sea of careful, polished, forgettable corporate writing, sounding like a human being is the only thing that stands out.

the same thing happens when you teach. explain something simply to a person who doesn't share your background and two things happen at once. they remember you, and you understand it better than you did before. giving the knowledge away somehow leaves you with more of it.

the long game

Kleon's honest that there's no shortcut. you show up, you get a little better, you keep going, and for a long stretch it feels like nothing. then it isn't nothing. someone two levels up says your name in a room you weren't in. the account you'd written off comes back to you directly. seven readers becomes two thousand, and you barely notice the moment it turns.

none of this is about ego. if anything it's the opposite, a kind of generosity that happens to be good for your career. you take work you already did and you make it legible to the people who need it. that's the most useful thing you can do for them, and, not by accident, for yourself.

Kleon wrote it for artists. i think he wrote it for us too. we just needed someone to translate.