Collect Your Wins Before They Go Cold

This article is part of the Design Your Promotion and Get Paid at the Right Number course. Click here to explore the full course.

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Somebody I was coaching told me they’d helped with a dbt migration. That was the whole sentence. I asked what actually happened and they weren’t sure. A manager had signed off on something, the migration finished, and their part in it had dissolved into “helped with.”

I pushed, because “helped with” gets you nothing in a promotion case, no matter how much of the work was actually theirs.

Whoever decides your raise never saw you do the work

My own numbers put it above 70 percent. Most data professionals report to somebody who can’t read their code. That person can’t evaluate a migration or a query rewrite directly. They can weigh money, time, risk and speed, and nothing else.

So the work you’re proud of is invisible by default. The person who signs off on your raise wasn’t there when it happened, and the conversation that actually sets your pay happens somewhere else, later, without you.

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And before everything else, here’s the link to the first part of my Promotion OS I use with all my coaching clients and help them earn more.

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