The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows.

Everyone needs to advocate for themselves.

A good boss will be getting feedback from everyone and staying on top of things. A mediocre boss will merely see "obvious" things like "who closed the most tickets." A bad boss may just play favorites and game the system on their own.

If you've got a bad boss who doesn't like you, you're likely screwed regardless. But most bosses are mediocre, not actively bad.

And in that case, the person who consistently helps unblock everyone needs to be advertising that to their manager. The person who's work doesn't need revisiting, who doesn't cause incidents needs to be hammering that home to their manager. You can do that without throwing your teammates under the bus, but you can't assume omnipotence or omniscience. And you can't wait until the performance review cycle to do it, you have to demonstrate it as an ongoing thing.

Your boss can know about it, but if their boss wants data on performance you’re back in the same boat.

Funny you mention engineers needing to market themselves though. That leads to its own consequences. I’ve been at a place where everyone needed to market their own work in order to get promoted, to get raises, and to stay off the chopping block.

The end result? The engineers at the company who get promoted are… good at self-promotion, not necessarily good at engineering. Many of the best engineers at the company—who were hired to do engineering—languish in obscurity while people who can game the system thrive. People get promoted who are only good at cranking out poorly-made deliverables that burden their team with excessive long-term maintenance issues. They fuck off to higher levels of the company, leaving their team to deal with the consequences of their previous work.

Run that script for five or ten years and it doesn’t seem to be working out well for the company.

When it comes time for layoffs, it generally isn't what your boss knows, it's what your boss's grandboss thinks to throw onto a spreadsheet at the eleventh hour before Quarterly Reports are due.

A good direct boss might keep you on track for a bonus or other "local advancement", maybe even a promotion, but many companies you are only as valued as the ant numbers you look like from the C Suite's mile high club. (Which doesn't protect your good boss, either.)

> The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows.

100%. You ask me to do the near impossible, I'll pull it off. But you will be very well-versed in how hard it is first.

I agree it's a mistake but one thing that's never taken into account in this discussion is that many people find it enough that they are doing their jobs. They don't want to do marketing. A lot of tech people are like that which is a real tragedy.