Dear Reader,

Your ability to communicate your ideas and accomplishments is crucial to standing out and getting noticed.

Most developers assume your manager is responsible for noticing your work and recognizing you for it.

Unfortunately, this does not happen always.

You often don’t get the expected reward, which makes you feel sad and betrayed.

But instead of solely relying on others for praise and recognition of your work, take it into your own hands and start communicating your achievements and the challenges you overcome.

You can do this in many ways, but today, I will share one of the most effective ways: hallway conversations.

A hallway conversation got me into a highly visible project 20 years ago.

Let’s dive into that story.

After two hours of focus session, I took a small break, and while returning to my desk, I saw one of the senior leaders coming from the opposite side of the halfway.

I stopped and said hi to him.

He returned my greeting and asked if I was a new hire. “Hey! It's good to see you. Are you a new member? I have not seen you before.”

He was right; I joined a month ago and worked on an internal research project that did not have much visibility within the company.

I answered, “Yeah, my name is Vinod Sharma, and I joined last month as a senior .NET developer. I am writing an exciting code that pulls the data from the Microsoft SQL database and inserts it into an Excel file.”

You see, my response was less than 30 seconds long and enough to grab his attention.

He asked me more about it, and I shared more details about my code.

“I have written a C# program that reads data from several SQL database tables and then writes it into an Excel file using Excel object libraries.”

He got even more interested and asked me to show it to him.

So we went to my desk. I ran the program, which magically opened a new Excel file and inserted data into rows and cells. My program also changed cell colors based on various rules I had written in my code.

Now he was super impressed and asked me to come with him to meet another manager.

We went, and he asked the other manager to put me on her project.

“Anuja, move Vinod to your team. He has already written a program similar to what you need for your project.”

So, I was moved from my in-house research project to the 3rd most visible project in the company.

That’s how you can turn small hallway conversations into new opportunities, better projects and better roles.

This is the power of small halfway talks, and I use them all the time to share exciting projects and learn about others.

You never know when you will say something another person is interested in.

Don’t rely on others to find your good work and experience.

Stand up for yourself so that you can stand out.

What was your biggest win this week? Share with me.

Your friend,
Vinod