3 awful ways data engineers try to get attention (and what actually works)
Because bragging, Jira dumps, and jargon aren’t the path to a raise.
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I’ve seen data engineers shoot themselves in the foot chasing attention. Hell, I’ve done it myself.
I thought if I just worked harder, people would notice. Or if I tossed around some fancy tech names, they’d respect me more. Or if I made sure everyone knew exactly what I did, my manager would hand me the promotion.
None of that worked.
Instead, I looked like noise. Or worse, invisible.
So let’s call it out. Here are 3 awful ways data engineers try to get attention, and why they always backfire.
The tech flex
Bragging about tech is the oldest trap in the book.
I’ve done it. I once walked into a meeting and unloaded a list: dbt, Spark, and Airflow. I thought I sounded like the smartest person in the room.
You know what happened? Half the room glazed over. The other half had no idea what I was talking about.
I figured if I stacked enough buzzwords, people would connect the dots to “hard work” or “innovation.” They didn’t. They just tuned me out.
Here’s the ugly truth: outside your bubble, nobody cares. Your VP doesn’t get excited because you rewired ingestion jobs. Finance isn’t losing sleep over schema drift.
When you lead with tools, it feels like flexing. And flexing comes off desperate. Worse, it buries your actual impact.
The real business win, faster launches, cleaner metrics, more revenue confidence, never makes it through the noise.
So instead of sounding impressive, you end up sounding irrelevant.
The it’s-all-about-me update
I used to write updates that read like a diary of my greatness.
“I built this.”
“I fixed that.”
“I stayed late to make sure the whole thing shipped.”
In my head, I was proving how valuable I was. I thought my boss would look at those lines and see “dedication” and “ownership.”
What they actually saw was someone hogging the spotlight.
Here’s the thing: leaders don’t reward lone rangers. They reward multipliers. People who make the team stronger, faster, more effective.
When every win is framed as your personal hero story, you don’t look like a leader. You look like a bottleneck.
I’ve watched this backfire in real time. A peer of mine constantly posted “I” updates. Every sprint, it was a highlight reel of their solo efforts.
You know what happened? Their manager stopped seeing them as reliable. Because if the project depends on one person doing everything, that’s fragility.
And fragility doesn’t get you more budget. It doesn’t get you bigger bets. It makes people wonder how quickly things will break the second you’re gone.
The silent grind
For the longest time, I thought hard work spoke for itself.
I’d bury myself in pipelines, schemas, and late-night fixes. Three weeks of sweat poured into something invisible, and I figured people would just know. That a promotion or bigger budget would magically show up.
It never did.
Here’s the problem: silence doesn’t build trust. It builds invisibility. And invisible work is easy to overlook when the next planning cycle comes around.
I once spent a quarter holding up a critical data project. Twelve-hour days, firefighting nonstop. When the launch wrapped, guess what omeone else got the credit. The person who wrote updates. The one who spoke in business terms. The one who made their work visible.
Meanwhile, I was just “the guy behind the curtain.”
That lesson stung. Because hard work doesn’t get rewarded if nobody knows it happened. And nobody connects the dots between your refactored pipeline and the revenue dashboard being right in next week’s board deck — unless you tell them.
Grinding in silence doesn’t make you look dedicated. It makes you replaceable.
Want something practical right now for FREE?
I made a simple 1-page checklist called Win Signals.
It’s just three quick prompts you can run through before you share an update. Nothing fancy. Just enough to stop you from sounding like noise or disappearing into the background.
It won’t turn you into an influence machine overnight. But it’ll make your next update land better than 90% of engineers out there.
Final thoughts
Attention is a currency. Spend it wrong, and you go broke. Spend it right, and you buy trust, budget, and promotions.
The problem is most data engineers go broke. They chase the wrong kind of attention. They flex tools nobody cares about. They frame every update like a solo victory lap. Or they grind in silence and hope someone notices.
I’ve done all three. Each one felt safe at the time, like the right move. But all they did was keep me invisible.
Here’s the truth I wish I’d learned earlier: hard work doesn’t speak. Only humans do.
If your work isn’t tied to dollars, speed, or decisions in a way people can see, it’s forgettable.
The fix isn’t bragging louder. It’s learning how to package your wins so the people holding the budget actually listen.
That’s why I built the Impact Communication Playbook. It’s the system I wish I had years ago, back when I was broke in attention. If you’re ready to stop losing credit and start buying influence, it’s waiting for you.
Thanks for reading,
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Deep house 😅