Writing a Brag Doc for Performance Review

December 20th, 2023 (about 1 year ago) • 5 minutes

I had my first performance review at work today. It went well and here's my reflection on it.

Writing a brag document and reflecting on it has helped me tremendously during this session. A brag document is where you 'brag' about all your accomplishments. It should be updated frequently, but the interval will be up to your preference—either weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Avoid leaving it until the end of the quarter or year, as you're likely to forget many events.

After writing the brag doc, use it as a point of reflection. Also, share it with your manager and peer reviewers. From my experience, they will greatly appreciate it as the doc saves them time from writing their own reviews of your performance and gives them visibility into your work, including the smaller tedious ones.

Brag Doc

A format I used is inspired by Julia Evans. I included my exact template and an example of what I wrote for each section.

1. Major Accomplishments & Projects. Specify the major project as well as the impact it had on the company.

   • Production-ize EMR v6 based on docker architecture. I was responsible for the research on EMR architecture, evaluation between the different spark-submit methodology, setting up unit/integration test framework as well as integrating CI/CD pipelines. The ground work done here helps engineers to build extensible spark pipelines ie DP3.

2. Collaboration & Mentorship. Describe how you've helped others and how you've collaborated with others.

   • I regularly help other engineers in areas where I have developed expertise, such as infrastructure-related domains, Kubernetes, AWS, Spark, Airbyte, and OMD. This has provided me the opportunity to uphold code quality (adhering to best practices) and disseminate knowledge.
   • Mentored S in the planning and implementation of the Snowflake Terraform module upgrade project.

3. Design & documentation. Describe how you've improved the design and documentation of the project.

   • Wrote design document for source column ingestion from upstream producers, which is a key initiative to be implemented in the following quarter

4. Skills Development. Describe how you've improved your skills in both technical and soft domain.

   • Kafka and CDC infrastructure.
   • How to mentor and guide other engineers on their tasks.
   • How to plan and scope big projects into manageable chunks.

5. Positive Feedback. Include positive feedback from others.

   • Recognized by the team for resolving and taking ownership of the XXX ETL incident that caused significant data delays I helped in brainstorming fixes that we could implement in the short term, calculating resource bump ups needed and finally planning and deployment. I also contributed in providing long term solutions to this particular pipeline

6. Team/Company Building. What did you do to help the company grow or raise the bar slightly higher?

   • Improved the onboarding materials and documentation for new joiners.
   • Doing campus recruiting for new grads

7. Goals for next year. Think and write about what you want to accomplish next year.

   • Mentoring and guiding more junior engineers on the team.
   • Own and lead at least 1 large initiative end-to-end.
   • Be involved in at least 1 cross-pod initiative.

Review Session

Here are some of the talking points I used as well as the examples that I had with my manager during the session. Use this session to explain the big picture and provide more explanations on what your goals are. It's also a good time to ask for feedback on how you can improve or level up.

1. Likes / Wins

   • I like mentoring and guiding junior engineers, seeing them getting unblocked is satisfying.
   • I like planning and collaborating on vague problems - it’s challenging but rewarding.

2. Dislikes / Challenges

   • Tech debts: Allocate time to review tech debts and resolving them, instead of accumulating to the end of quarter.
   • Moving fast: Look into managed option of a product for POC before putting a lot of time into deploying open source. Clarifying requirements with customers before building.
   • Disassociation with business value: How to tie the work we are doing with business value as a metric to incentives team members?

3. Moving Forward. Tell your manager what you want to do next year. If it's a promotion, be straightforward about it - you won't get what you don't ask for.

   • Be in charge of an intern/junior.
   • Cross pod initiative and be involved in pod-based discussions.

4. Feedback

   • What can I do to be involved in high impact and visibility work?
   • What’s the gap between me reaching L2 or L3 that I should work on more? And what would make me a candidate for a promotion?
   • What goals are you working towards and what can I do to make your job easier?
     • This is an important question to ask your manager. Directly solving what your manager is having trouble on is a direct route to make you stand out and be extra valuable.