Tips for Standing Out

"If you don't get noticed, you don't have anything. You just have to be noticed, but the art is in getting noticed naturally, without screaming or without tricks. --Leo Burnett"

Recently, I have been going through our family digital pictures. There's quite a lot of them, and I'm afraid that I haven't been great about any sort of categorizing or even avoiding duplicates. So, with literally thousands of digital pictures, I'm sorting, organizing, and moving them to cloud storage. In going through them, I started wondering. I had just gone through 30+ pictures of dolphins at a zoo and was currently looking at almost fifty pictures of a gift exchange at Christmas (more pictures than there appeared to be attendees), and I started considering the value of an individual photo in the age of ubiquitous digital cameras.

Sure- I could have organized the images in a given folder by general context and then subordered the images within a context by general worth. Color and lighting quality, view of the subject of the photo, etc. Establishing a baseline to determine which photos are worth keeping and which are not. And after a great deal of time and effort, I could have come up with the absolute best images to keep.

I didn't. I deleted something like 80 images because after picking out a few that represented the scene or event, even going through the rest of them to see if there were any other good images simply wasn't worth the time. The value of each individual image was very low. If it didn't immediately stick out as worth keeping, it wasn't even worth the time to look further at the image.

It shouldn't be difficult to see where this is going, but let's keep moving, shall we?

So how do we, as developers, stand out from the crowd. It's tempting to believe that consistently delivering quality work will to this, but let's face facts. In this world of development teams, project teams, and managers that have so much on their plates that things just naturally fall through the cracks, this simply isn't true. Nope- not even for you. (Mostly directed at 10 Years Ago Matt, who honestly believed just this.)

So what helps people stand out? When a manager thinks of your department or wants to assign a person to a task, what can make you jump into mind?

How to Stand Out

1. Don't be afraid to pitch ideas. Don't come off as critical and certainly make sure you aren't taking time away from something else. But don't be afraid to try. Code is best communicated through code so don't rely on the clumsiness of spoken word to communicate your code ideas. Build a demo. Cite sources. Make a pitch.
2. Talk to people. When you talk informally with colleagues or even, if your organization allows this, superiors, you have an opportunity to discuss ideas outside the delicate context of "Here's a change I think we need to make". This gives a degree of safety to the discussion- you're not proposing invasive changes, you're talking shop. You're exchanging ideas rather than making a pitch. Again- don't be critical and don't be a pest. But participate in the developer community of your office. People remember contributors. "Head down, mouth shut" often also means "forgotten".
3. Don't be afraid to ask for things. Is there a project you want to be a part of? Is there another role you'd like to fill? Ask. Maybe the decision maker will agree with you and maybe not. But your odds of getting what you want increase sharply when you communicate what you want.
4. In order to do #3, you really need to take this step. Be honest with yourself on what you want and what you can do. A central theme to everything I've said here is that you cannot properly use something you don't know and understand. That includes you. Want to become a Development Lead? Understand, then, your leadership abilities and how you can best display the skills necessary for the job. Asking is important, but if you can't show that you fit what you want, then you won't get what you want.
5. Be the guy that asks questions and offers solutions. Everyone can criticize. Even if they're not being critical, any good developer can summarize a problem. The trick is to be the one trying to help reach a solution.

How to NOT Stand Out

1. Brag. We've all created elegant code and we've all come up with clever solutions. And we all like to talk about them. But there's a line between talking about things you've done and bragging. If you never talk about your accomplishments, chances are that no one will recognize them. If you brag, chances are no one will care.
2. Butt in. Again, there's a fine line between offering help and butting in. Chances are, if you're the guy that always has a better solution and can't let even the smallest issue go by without comment, you've crossed that line. This, too, will make you stand out.
3. Criticize. You want to offer solutions because they think they can help. Great. But if you want to offer solutions because you think the current implementation is bad/stupid/incompetent then you'll definitely stand out from the crowd. Just not the way you want.

Let's face it. There are a lot of developers out there. There are even a lot of good developers who deserve to stand out. But it's not the job of other people to notice you. It's your job to be noticed for adding worth to what you do.