Some time ago, a colleague from another team asked me if I was actually good at my job. The question caught me off guard and I don't remember what I answered.

It feels uncomfortable to me to say that I'm good at my job. It feels like bragging. It makes it seem like I'm trying to make myself sound more important than I am. At the same time, it wouldn't have been honest to talk down my work. I stood there, realizing that a simple question didn't have a simple answer.

I kept (over-)thinking about it for a while afterwards.

Not about the question itself, but about why he had to ask it in the first place.

My colleague works on a different team. He doesn't see what I work on every day. He doesn't see the problems I solve. He doesn't see the decisions I make or the things I've built. So how would he know if I'm good at my job? On top of that, he obviously has no idea what I actually do all day.

The answer is pretty obvious. If I never talk about it, there's no way he could know.

I think many people know this feeling. You want to do good work, but you don't want to constantly talk about it. You don't want to put every small achievement on display. You don't want to be the person in every meeting bragging about their latest accomplishment. I wouldn't enjoy being that person either.

So you just work and work.

You do your tasks. You solve problems. You help colleagues. You make sure things keep working, and often before they stop working.

At some point, you realize that a large part of that work is basically invisible to everyone else.

For a long time, I thought that good work speaks for itself. It's a nice idea. If you're good at your job, the right people will notice.

But this only works sometimes in small teams.

The bigger an organization gets, though, the less true it becomes.

CEOs don't see eight hours of your workday (and they don't have to care, to be honest). Department heads don't either. Most of the time, they don't see even 1% of it. They only see the results (and that's probably the only thing they want to see). They see the final output of a long chain of work.

All the small decisions you made on the way usually disappear.

Nobody sees the bug you caught in time. No one sees the discussion that prevented a problem. No one sees the hour you spent simplifying something complicated. No one sees the ten things that didn't go wrong because you were paying attention.

And that's not even criticism.

It would be impossible to see everything.

In a company with hundreds or thousands of employees it's impossible to keep track of everyone's work. Sometimes I can't even keep track of my own work. Instead, people form their opinions based on what they can see and hear.

In that scenario, it's not only what you do that matters. It also matters what others know about your work.

In my opinion, that idea just feels wrong.

The work itself should matter, not the story around it.

Eventually, though, I had to admit that the two are connected.

If you never talk about your work you can't really be surprised when people know very little (or nothing) about it.

That doesn't mean you have to become a self-promoter. It doesn't mean celebrating every completed task or constantly marketing yourself.

There's a lot of space between bragging and being completely invisible.

You can talk about what you're working on. You can explain the problems you've solved. You can share things that nobody else gets to see.

Maybe that's actually part of the job even if many of us (or just me) don't like it.

The interesting thing is that we usually notice bragging much faster in ourselves than in other people. When someone explains what they've been working on in an easy-to-understand way, I usually don't think they're showing off. Well, it depends on how they say it, but usually I just think: Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that.

It still feels different when it's me.

That said, I suppose you sometimes have to step outside your comfort zone and talk to people about your work.