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Getting Credit for Programming Accomplishments?
An anonymous reader writes "I am a college student new to corporate culture. For the last few weeks, I have been working on a very large project: revamping our customer service website with tons of new tutorials and information. Recently, I got an e-mail forwarded from my supervisor of improvements that HIS supervisor requested. I am fine with compliments and complaints about my work. However, I realized in the e-mail that my supervisor took credit for the development of this content. I have been under his direct supervision in this whole process; much of the new content was his idea that I ended up implementing. Is it out of line to request that in the future I get mentioned for my work?"
Its pretty normal in any industry for the supervisor/manager/CEO to take credit for the work of those under them. Just keep chuggin along, eventually you'll get noticed and promoted. You shouldn't do the work for the credit, you should do it for the sake of the company and the greater good. That's when you really get noticed.
There are some companies out there that have the generosity to credit their programmers (heck, this is why Activision was formed) in their software, but not nearly the majority of them and especially if its not an in house application.
You're not special - just a development resource. If you hadn't done it, someone else would have. You can always `reply to all` and point out how good you think your work was, but before you do you might want to think about how it would read if someone had sent you that email. Would you think `wow, yeah - well done`, or `er, why are you telling me? I do good work every day without expecting a shiny badge`?
He knows you did the work, and he's probably very happy with it. Is it really that important at this stage of your career to have your acomplishments passed up the ladder? You're a new grad. Don't look upon simple job security with disdain - it's a nice reward these days.
Out of line? Maybe... it depends on your corporate culture. I would never make the suggestion at my current employer, but YMMV.
Generally, though, it doesn't make any sense to do so. Even if you're successful in getting your supervisor to mention you, his supervisor is more than likely going to response with "Who?" or "That's nice..." or something equivalent.
In my relatively short career, I've learned to appreciate recognition when it comes by, but to never expect it.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
You're in a position where your boss depends on you. And he's promoting it. Who cares what management thinks. Is your paycheck sufficient? If not, just wait until a few weeks before the next big delivery and tell your boss you've found another job offering you what you think you should get paid. Since he's on the hook, he'll probably try to keep you happy.
You could ask him to mention your name to the big wigs but what would that get you, really? Are you under some impression that your ability in software development will move you up the chain? Because I've noticed that's not really what does it at most companies.
No, my suggestion to you would be to keep chugging along and if nothing else, put it on your resume confident you can back what you put on there. Then expand your horizons and call in sick a few days for the sake of a few interviews. If you have no other options, you are probably forced to play this symbiosis of your manager needing you and you needing him despite your perception he adds nothing.
Whatever turns out, it sure is great experience. If you are certain you can do the hardcore development and provide the functionality your middle management provides, have you thought about starting your own company? That's an option I think more and more about everyday
My work here is dung.
Your team (meaning your manager's team) gets credit for the work you do. You get credit for it later by way of a good performance review and, hopefully, a raise and/or bonus.
Your manager knows who did the work, and if he's any kind of a decent manager, he'll reward you for it, although the reward may not be readily apparent immediately. Perhaps when your manager moves up (partially because you made him look good), he'll remember that you're a dependable employee who produces quality work, and he'll bring you up with him, or put in a good word for you to take over the department he's vacating. Hell, maybe the guy quits to go somewhere else and ends up taking you with him.
If you are a good and dependable worker, and especially if you show you are more concerned with making the company better than you are with your own short-term gain, then you will go far. If you show yourself to be the kind of guy who constantly whines about not getting enough credit, you'll be kept down and eventually forced out. Don't be that guy.
The company you're at is too big. Simple as that. If you want people to recognise your individual input you need to work for a smaller company where people have the time to get to know you as an individual rather than just one of their hundreds of colleagues.
:) ) for a company with two other employees. We all know precisely who did what and who should get the credit. I love it.
:(
There are disadvantages to this mind you. If everyone recognises each others input then if you screw up you'll find it hard to pass the buck (technically this is also an advantage because noone else can either). Typically your job will pay a little less and not be as secure either, though in the current economic climate noone is all that well paid or safe. You'll also find it's always you working late at a small company simply because there's noone else to do it.
I work (well, 'play' would be closer..
The other advantage of working for a tiny company is that everyone can have a really impressive title. I'm "Head of Production". It impresses all the girls.
Girls? Girls? Hey.. come back.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
It's pretty common in the corporate world for your boss to take credit for the work that you did. In this case, it's not even that far out of line, as what you did was an implementation of ideas and suggestions that your boss made.
I'm going to give advice to you based on you being a fresh graduate: I'd have different advice for someone who's been in the corporate world for a few years.
My suggestion to you is three-fold:
1) Wait a year and get a feel for the corporate culture before you do anything to get visibility and recognition further up the food chain.
2) If there are other people on your team that *do* manage to get credit for their work with the higher-ups, watch them closely and see how they do it.
3) If you are truly excellent, your work will stand out eventually anyway. Again: wait a year and see what your reputation is at that point before you start promoting yourself. You may end up having very little promoting to do.
" I have been under his direct supervision in this whole process; much of the new content was his idea that I ended up implementing."
So your boss decided what needed to be done, how it should be done, and picked you to do it. He then took credit for it. Gee imagine that.
You work for him and you did what he said to do. Yes it is his credit to take. If you did a crummy job he would take the heat and then fire you but he might still loose his job if you did a bad enough job and he approved it.
Any credit you get will be from him. That is the way it really is supposed to work. If you do an extraordinary job then he may decide that are worth praising to his boss.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Nothing like playing poker with your career. I had a coworker who pulled this bluffing stunt only to have the boss reach out to shake his hand and wish him luck at the new job. The guy thought he was an invaluable software developer and had a rude awakening. He finally got a job 8 months later at a help desk.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
Somewhere in the code, comment what you did and when, including your name. In a number of companies (including the one I work for), this is required for traceability for changes. If you're company is using any form of version control, it's a good bet that this will make sure your work can always be traced back to you. If you don't end up with some credit/raise/bonus/something by the end of the year, you can always point to this and ask why.
I am the original asker. I know it's hard to trust ACs but I speak the truth :)
I want to clarify this has nothing to do with programming, it's adding tutorials etc. to a website. The programming thing must have been added by editors.
Many have mentioned how he would take the heat if something bad happened under his supervision. I have definitely seen him do this and can recognize the tradeoff a lot better now. I see what you all mean, my recognition is eventual promotion/raise from my direct supervisor, not some guy who's seen me twice reading my name in an e-mail. However, 7 bucks an hour for this work seems kinda small but that's another story :)
Wait, what? You say "much of the new content was his idea that I ended up implementing" and you want the credit/atta boy/good job chimp?
The ideas and solutions are what get people noticed and praised, what you did is no different than sending the spec off to India and having them churn it out. What you did is no different than a McBurger flipper making tha cheesburgers for the manager, why exactly do you deserve praise? You kids these days, unbelievable. Your paid to do your job, if you want praise try coming up with the good ideas.
about seeking the praise of others.
Getting public praise is like pissing your pants: everyone around you can see it happening, but only you can feel the warmth.
Something to consider when asking yourself how hard you want to press for this.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
If you have ever seen code come back from India- most especially web code - then you know why it's $10 an hour.
:o)
There must be talented web developers over there, but I have never run across any of them in any project I've been associated with.
Instead we've gotten back code that included ( unapproved ) javascript libraries with CC non-commercial licenses ( did I mention they were working on corporate tools ), sometimes with all the licensing and identifying comments removed... but method names and file names unchanged.
600K CSS files with class names like 'myClass', and multiple - stacked - browser hacks. Php with references like 'myVar' , 'var1' and 'foo'.
Companies learn, but they have to learn the hard way. Hiring two contractors to rewrite an app so we can have a prayer of maintaining was a bitter pill, but now I get to say what gets outsourced and to whom
Oh, and so I'm not completely OT - I'd say bite your tongue. If he's a decent guy, you will get credit - even if not in every email. If he's not, do your time, fluff the resume and move on. If you are looking to be a developer, you will almost certainly end up moving a few times before you find your niche anyway.
I'm ( finally ) very happy where I am now, but it took a few times to find the right language, the right environment, and the right people.
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More importantly, he doesn't want them to care who he is yet.
Trust me, new hires do not (or should not, if they have any sense) want to come to the attention of people two or more levels above them. Bad things will come of it.
It never plays out the same way, but it always turns out bad for the new hire.
Trust me, you do not want upper management to know who you are yet.
--MarkusQ
P.S. There's an old saying "Whether the pitcher hits the rock or the rock hits the pitcher, it bodes ill for the pitcher."
Blowing your own horn is a good way to lose respect, fast.
And hiding in the closet is a good way to never get any in the first place.
Obviously the guy needs to find some middle way, but it's going to make more than one project for him to figure it out. Maybe he's got a good boss who will remember that he's a good worker and assign him increased responsibilities with a proportionally increased reward. Or maybe he's got a shitty boss that will remember him as a good slave and will assign him increased responsibilities. He'll have to sit tight to see which one applies in order to plan a course of action, there's no shortcuts in office politics.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
What credit were you looking for, exactly? This is how these things go:
...and so this is the project our department completed last week.
BOSS:
BIG BOSS: Ah, good, very nice.. hm, this looks excellent. Good work, Johnson. I'll show the executives at tomorrow's meeting.
BOSS: Thank you.
And at tomorrow's meeting, it'll go like this:
BIG BOSS: And then last week we completed this project here, so that should increase revenue synergy paradigms across end-to-end B2B logistical e-markets.
EXECUTIVE: Great work, we'll announce it in the press release next week. Nicely done, Smith.
BIG BOSS: Thank you.
You get the point? Credit always goes to the person who finally presents it to the next link in the chain, which makes sense, as that person is also usually the one who masterminded the project and managed it to completion. It's a given that he didn't do it all by himself and that there were people under him who did most of the actual grunt work; everyone's aware of it but it isn't necessary to declare each and every individual.
It'd be like a military commander getting accolades from his commanding officer about some victory or other. The commander accepts it on behalf of everyone -- he doesn't need to name each and every damn grunt under his command, even though they were all instrumental in helping to win.
Relax, man. It doesn't matter who got credit for it to the higher-ups, who probably have no idea who you are anyway. Your boss knows what you did, and when it comes time to ask for a raise or whatever, he's the one you're going to be asking, and he'll remember.
(If you'd actually be asking someone above him, same deal. You can still put the project into your "List of good things I've done" when asking whoever and nobody will question you -- or if they want to check, your boss will confirm that yes, you were on that project.)
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
There are lots of replies to this thread and I just noticed it now, so I guess I'm late the the party. Let me offer my take. I've been out of college doing a programming job for 2 years now.
Is it normal? It all depends on the person. I've done things I thought were relatively simple or not with a lot of praise that my boss has promoted to others/superiors as great work by me. This is both things I thought up and implemented, and things that I was requested to do. I have done other things that I thought were great (including big/obvious things system users noticed) that nothing was said about. The pattern is the same with other people who are above me but not my boss. That's just the way things are.
But there are some people who are like that. We have one in our company, and as the size of the company you work for grows over 1 person, the probability of running into one starts to approach a sure thing.
Good ideas mismanaged, bad ideas implemented when much simpler ideas would have worked better, boldly taking credit for other people's work while they are standing there, covering up their mistakes as someone else's fault (bonus points for lying and saying they caught the error and fixed it when it was their fault).
You'll see it all. It's mostly a personality thing. Depending on tons of things this happens. Your boss may have deserved credit over you in one circumstance for thinking of the idea or great management. You may have deserved the credit. It could be neither of you. You just have to learn to accept this kind of stuff. If you think it's being done on purpose and to take advantage of you... just learn to accept it. We (at my office) except that kind of behavior out of various people (both internal and external) so it doesn't bother us. If someone does it, it's par for the course. If they DONT'T do it, it's a bonus. Also remember that there are two possibilities for your boss when they take credit for your idea. Either they know it was your work and you become more indispensable, or they are blind how important you were to the project and lacking the ability to see that may come back to bight them later.
It's all in the attitude. In my time in the work world it's crushing/mismanaging of good ideas that seems to bother me more.
If things are REALLY bad enough, you can call the boss on it. You can try and use it as leverage. You can even just quit. The question is do you care enough to risk all that? Any of those could easily make it harder to get hired somewhere else. But like I (and many others) have said: this will happen everywhere.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
In the OPs situation I think another approach which I've found useful is to attach your name to the work you do. It doesn't have to be conspicuous, but just a note at the bottom of his tutorials saying "If you have any problems with these tutorials please contact Joe Bloggs", gets your name noticed. I tend to stick my contact details on the error pages for applications I write ("You appear not to have entered your name - if you're having problems contact XXX"). This gets me an occasional call to help with a simple problem, but also lets people know who did the work.
The newbie could start writing his name on all his deliverables. Since he is the one doing all the writing, he should put his name first. If his manager reviews, edits, or polishes the employee's deliverable before sending it up the ladder, then it would be appropriate for the boss to add his name as a contributor *after* the author's name. The same rule applies to documents, slide decks, books, emails, and so on.
Anyone who deletes names in order to steal credit is a thief. And the only person worse than a thief is the one who failed to fire him.
If he can't stand working with thiefs in corporate america, he could always experiment with crooks, pirates, lawyers, and politicians on a more global scale.
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