This is a lesson I keep repeating to our juniors: when you do something notable, celebrate it, and make sure to include the whole team, the users and the boss in the celebration.
It can be as simple as an email, but sometimes, making a few chat messages or even calls. It takes times, it seems silly, but you get a fantastic ROI on this.
Because now people see your work as valuable. It's concrete to them. They understand its value. And this has many positive consequences on your life.
This, of course, works only if the celebration avoids technical terms, is short, straight to the point, and explain what's the benefit to them and the org and how much it took to to it.
People must know that you are doing a good job, and you are the only one that is in the position to let them know. They will not get out of their way to learn about this.
E.G of a chat message I would send to my client's team boss:
Hello <first name>, it took 3 weeks, but we finally finished improving <system x>. This should save us <y> of <z> in the future. We tried hard to make sure your work is not disturbed by the change so it should be transparent for you. But let me know if you notice anything out of the ordinary. Cheers
Believe it or not, people actually like it. It keeps them in the loop, give them context and perspective, and help them take better decisions. So don't hesitate to do it.
> It keeps them in the loop, give them context and perspective, and help them take better decisions
Other side of the coin:
"I just spent 2 weeks optimising a daily process to be twice as fast" might well end up in me wondering why anyone would care about the 1 minute reduction in delivery time for daily cadence data. It might also result in me being stroppy about work I cannot get resourced that has obvious $ value.
But that is also a win for the business. Either I am wrong and am persuaded of the value, or I am not and I become more engaged with stakeholder prioritisation and we set up something more effective.
That's good feedback to have. If your boss/client step in and says "we don't need that", this allows you to re-calibrate the team priorities and shows you need to get better at extracting the real need in the future.
I completely agree with your initial comment and your response here. Transparency is a great feedback loop. And it's always good to celebrate what you do.
1) Break something on purpose. 2) Make sure the business notice it (usually a spectacular cost increase does the job).
3) Come in and fix the issue
4) Make a cost comparison quick chart before/after
5) Become famous
If you look long enough in most code bases, you will eventually find a spectacular problem.
Case in point, I was working for several months for a client, and I had a slow afternoon, so I decided to convert some calculation to numpy, see if we gained any free perf.
We got a x100 local speed up, which was very fishy. Gaining speed is common with vectorization, but two orders of magnitude is a lot.
So I looked at the original algo. There was a glaring mistake in it, that I fixed by my numpy code without noticing, and just changing that in the pure Python algo, without using numpy at all, made it X50 faster.
I could then call my client, and celebrate the good news. Not "there was a mistake", no. But "we found margin for progress".
It can be as simple as an email, but sometimes, making a few chat messages or even calls. It takes times, it seems silly, but you get a fantastic ROI on this.
Because now people see your work as valuable. It's concrete to them. They understand its value. And this has many positive consequences on your life.
This, of course, works only if the celebration avoids technical terms, is short, straight to the point, and explain what's the benefit to them and the org and how much it took to to it.
People must know that you are doing a good job, and you are the only one that is in the position to let them know. They will not get out of their way to learn about this.
E.G of a chat message I would send to my client's team boss:
Hello <first name>, it took 3 weeks, but we finally finished improving <system x>. This should save us <y> of <z> in the future. We tried hard to make sure your work is not disturbed by the change so it should be transparent for you. But let me know if you notice anything out of the ordinary. Cheers
Believe it or not, people actually like it. It keeps them in the loop, give them context and perspective, and help them take better decisions. So don't hesitate to do it.