Why you never get what you need in your data engineering career (and stay stuck at IC)
You’re not under-leveled. You’re under-recognized. This steals your visibility, blocks your promotion, and keeps you in the shadows.
Have you ever felt like you’re doing everything right and still getting nowhere?
You ship projects. You fix problems before they break. You hold the data stack together while everyone else pretends dashboards build themselves.
But when the promotions hit? When new scope get handed out? When leaders talk about impact and budget, and business value?
Your name doesn’t come up.
It’s not because you’re bad at your job. You’re probably one of the best. That’s the problem.
You believe the work should speak for itself. You think clean pipelines, low latency, and no outages are proof enough. You assume someone, somewhere, is noticing.
They’re not.
The business doesn’t reward clean code. It rewards visible impact in money, risk, and time. If your work doesn’t show up in those units, it doesn’t exist.
Not in planning meetings. Not in QBRs. Not when your manager is lobbying for headcount.
You’re not under-leveled. You’re under-recognized.
And until that changes, nothing else will.
The real reason your impact is invisible
You’re not doing less. You’re doing more of the wrong thing.
Most senior ICs think visibility is about shouting louder or showing off in meetings. It’s not. It’s about creating a trail of evidence that links your work to the outcomes leadership actually tracks. Not rows and DAGs, but revenue, time, and risk.
Here’s what happens instead.
You ship a major project. It works. No issues, no drama, no fires. And then… nothing. No follow-up. No context. No one knows what changed or what it saved. You’ve already moved on to the next fire.
So your work gets buried. Not because it wasn’t valuable, but because it wasn’t legible. No one could use it as input for planning, budget, or strategy.
You end up solving real problems, but getting treated like a task executor. Invisible labor. Disposable output. One more ticket closer to burnout.
And that hurts. Not just professionally, but personally.
Because what you’re really looking for isn’t praise. It’s progress.
You want to see your work create motion. Unlock scope. Earn trust. Influence direction.
But without visibility, you get none of that. You stay on the same rung, while the ladder pulls farther out of reach.
Five habits stealing your visibility
You’re not stuck because you’re not capable. You’re stuck because you’ve normalized habits that kill visibility, one project at a time.
1. You treat delivery as the final step
You think “we shipped it” is enough. But unless someone can point to a business metric that moved, or a decision that changed, it never happened. Not in the rooms where it matters.
2. You never write the counterfactual
You fixed it. Great. But what would’ve happened if you didn’t? No one sees avoided outages, reduced churn, or unblocked workflows unless you show the cost of doing nothing. No counterfactual = no impact.
3. You speak in technical units
You talk about schema fixes and job retries. The business talks about margin, cash flow, and market risk. Until you translate, your message doesn’t land, it evaporates.
I wrote a full breakdown on how to start talking in revenue, cost, and risk instead of rows and retries, because that’s the language that gets you budget and influence.
4. You skip the artifact
Every impactful project should leave behind a one-pager: what changed, who benefited, and what it enabled. If you can’t explain the result in 30 seconds, it’s not going to survive a planning meeting.
5. You never name the beneficiary
You don’t quote the person whose life got easier. You don’t ask for the testimonial. You don’t drop the pull-quote into your update. That’s how your work gets recycled into someone else’s slide deck.
Can you answer these five?
If you're serious about growth, pull up your last three deliverables. No skipping. No guessing.
Answer these five questions. Out loud.
What business metric moved? Not a chart. A KPI someone in leadership actually cares about. Bonus: do you have a baseline and a delta?
What would’ve happened without it? Show me the risk avoided, the cost prevented, or the time saved. Make it tangible.
Who benefited—and can they back you up? Not "the business." A name. A role. Someone who felt the impact and would say it out loud.
What decision changed? Did your work influence a roadmap, a budget, a policy, or a strategic bet?
Where’s the artifact? The one-slide summary with the headline, numbers, and story that travels without you.
If you answered “no idea” or “I think so” to any of these, that’s where your growth is leaking.
Not your performance. Not your intelligence. Your visibility.
The hard truths you don’t want to hear
Your problem isn’t technical. It’s systemic. And it’s costing you every quarter.
Your CV says “delivered X.” Hiring managers want “moved Y by Z%.” You’re underselling yourself because you never tracked Y. (If you need help with that, I wrote a full guide on how to write a CV that actually gets you hired. Don’t let your resume be as invisible as your projects.)
You crave recognition. But you don’t create artifacts that make your work repeatable, provable, or promotable.
You think you’re blocked by lack of headcount. You’re blocked by lack of evidence in business units.
You call visibility “politics.” But what you’re really avoiding is translation and ownership. Politics is what happens when you skip those.
You ship fast and clean, then wonder why the same people with half your skill get all the credit. Here’s why:
Clarity beats brilliance. Every time.
Final thoughts
Promotions don’t follow clean pipelines. They follow recognized business impact.
You can build world-class systems, unblock teams, prevent fires—and still get left out of planning, skipped over for scope, and stuck at IC.
Not because your work doesn’t matter. Because you never finished the last 20%.
The part where you prove it happened, translate it into money, risk, or time, and get that story in front of people who decide headcount.
That’s what I teach next.
Become a paid subscriber and I’ll show you exactly how to close the loop, with real examples, templates, and a hands-on playbook to map your work to outcomes that get funded.
You’ll also unlock the full archive of premium guides, CV breakdowns, and the systems I used to grow faster (and earn more) without playing politics.
Don’t just deliver. Get recognized.
Yordan