Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings.

We've started August, and SF has been hot this past weekend! I hope you had a great weekend and managed to rest.

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Things I enjoyed in the past week

• ChatGPT, LLMs, and automating the fun out of roleplaying
• The invisible work draining your best employees

I'm still catching up after some vacation time, so this week has felt busier than usual. We're past the halfway mark; where has all the time gone?

This week I tried something different. Instead of just picking up tasks and doing them myself, I wanted to help other people move things forward rather than just moving them forward myself. It's a small shift, but it's been on my mind a lot, mostly because of something else that came up this week.

I was recently asked to weigh in on the promotion of three more junior engineers. Before I could say anything useful, I had to stop and ask myself if I'd actually worked with them recently. And once I got past that, what surfaced was their say-do ratio.

The say-do ratio is something used informally to calibrate engineers, and I've always classified it as sort of a "vibe" metric. It's important for a manager to gauge someone's say-do ratio, but I think it's just as important for you to be aware of your own.

In any conversation about the say-do ratio, there's always this idea of under-promising and over-delivering. But there's a goldilocks zone here too. If you do a lot but never say anything, the company will never promote you (the sad reality). You end up being "that person who does the things" but has nothing to point to when promo time comes around: no documentation, no visibility, no proof for the people making decisions about your case.

So the real question becomes: how do you build a good say-do ratio without burning out or being perceived as someone who just talks or just complains? The latter case is a sad scenario to be in.

As a staff engineer, this is one of the things I quietly gauge when I'm asked for promo support or asked to help with someone's packet. I'm not looking for Jira, more of a vibe. Do they deliver on what they promise? Are they missing their biggest commitments, or are they suggesting a lot but nothing moves forward? That tells you a lot.

This week's feedback requests through our internal portal, plus the promo conversation, brought all of this back for me personally too. I've been trying to be more deliberate about the tasks I actually take on, rather than just saying "this or that should be fixed" and leaving it at that. It's a small thing, but it changes how you show up.

Your turn

How do you think about your own say-do ratio? Do you lean more toward over-delivering quietly, or do you make a point of narrating the work as you go? I'd love to hear how you navigate that balance.

Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!

Happy coding!