Personalized Coaching for Senior, Staff, and Principal Engineers by a former Staff Engineer
A newsletter for Senior+ engineers doing strong work but not always seeing it translate into recognition, broader scope, or career momentum. Also useful for engineering leaders who want clearer language for developing these skills in their teams. Subscribe for thoughtful essays on influence, visibility, self-advocacy, and Staff-level growth.
[This edition also includes a meaningful update from the first Uncharted Office Hours and the deeper growth patterns that surfaced in the conversation.]
Looking back at my career, three beliefs made self-advocacy deeply uncomfortable.
First, it felt unfair. I was already putting significant effort into doing high-quality work, solving difficult problems, and being reliable. Why should I also have to spend more time making sure people understood what I had contributed?
Second, I associated self-advocacy with bragging and playing workplace politics. I did not identify with that kind of person.
Third, and perhaps most deeply, I did not want to appear difficult by asking for too much.
When I began coaching software engineers, I saw versions of these fears repeatedly. Many engineers also treated self-advocacy almost as a synonym for confrontation. They feared appearing demanding, creating unnecessary conflict, or damaging important relationships.
Self-advocacy can feel risky because it asks us to make something visible that we may have learned to keep private: what we contributed, what we believe, what we want, and what we need.
Self-Advocacy can feel unfair
Many engineers believe that doing their work well should be enough.
If we solved the problem, helped the team, delivered reliably, and produced a strong result, asking us to explain its value can feel like an additional tax.
This belief can become especially strong when other people seem to receive recognition more easily. We may watch someone speak confidently about work that appears less substantial than ours and conclude that the system rewards presentation over substance.
Sometimes, that criticism is fair. Organizations do not always distribute recognition equitably. Some people receive more sponsorship, more benefit of the doubt, or more room to take credit.
Still, refusing to participate does not correct that unfairness. It often leaves other people with even less information about our work, judgment, and aspirations.
It threatens how you see yourself
Self-advocacy can also feel inconsistent with the kind of person we want to be.
One client I coached cared deeply about humility. They worried that speaking more visibly about their work would feel boastful and culturally inauthentic. In high-visibility meetings, they often stayed quiet because they did not want to appear self-important or draw attention to themselves.
Humility was one of their core values. It helped them stay curious, credit others, and remain open to learning.
The difficulty was that their definition of humility also required them to disappear.
We eventually discussed the trade-off directly. They could continue protecting this narrow version of humility, but they might also have to accept the career limitations that came with remaining less visible.
The shift didn’t require them to become performative. Instead, they began making concise contributions earlier in meetings, documenting outcomes, and framing their work around how it helped the team move forward.
Their posture gradually shifted from avoiding attention to making useful things visible.
It exposes you to judgment
The moment we advocate for ourselves, we give other people something to assess.
If we say we are ready for a promotion, they may disagree.
If we explain the contribution we made, someone may believe we are claiming too much credit.
If we challenge an important decision, others may question our technical judgment or the reach of our influence.
If we share an ambition, we risk discovering that people do not yet see us the way we see ourselves.
Staying quiet can preserve ambiguity.
We can continue believing that we were overlooked only because no one understood the full story. But once we ask for calibration, support, scope, or recognition, we may receive information we do not want to hear.
Cultural and family conditioning can intensify this fear. Many of us learned early on that respecting authority meant deferring to it.
We may have been praised for being agreeable, un-demanding, or easy to manage. Speaking confidently about our needs can then feel less like professional communication and more like violating an old rule about how a “good person” behaves.
This is one reason engineers sometimes over-prepare before raising an issue. We try to eliminate every possible objection before speaking. We wait until our evidence is perfect, our contribution is undeniable, or our frustration has become unbearable.
By then, the conversation carries far more emotional weight than it needed to, and we enter it already at the end of our rope.
It may change the relationship
The deepest fear is usually not just that someone will disagree with us—it is that something between us will change.
Christie (name changed) and I returned to this pattern many times during our coaching work.
She was a tenured engineer with 20 years of experience across FAANG companies and startups. She was highly capable and thoughtful, and accustomed to carrying significant responsibility at home as well.
Yet some conversations about expressing her needs brought her to tears.
She knew intellectually that she needed to speak more directly, set clearer boundaries, and stop silently absorbing responsibility. Emotionally, though, those actions felt much more threatening.
Through our conversations, it became clear that she had learned to protect relationships by avoiding conflict. If she could adapt, compensate, or ask for less, she could preserve peace.
But that peace came at her expense.
She was carrying too much, working around needs that remained unspoken, and trying to maintain relationships without requiring other people to respond to what she needed.
At one point, I asked her a difficult question: Was it worth continuing relationships in which her needs and wants were not acceptable?
The question was not an invitation to abandon people after a disagreement. Long-term, healthy relationships contain tension, negotiation, disappointment, and repair.
It was an invitation to examine what kind of relationship can survive only when one person keeps silencing themselves.
That became a turning point.
Christie began practicing more direct conversations at home and at work. She learned to name what she needed without turning every conversation into a confrontation.
She used clearer language, asked for shared responsibility, set boundaries around her energy, and became more willing to tolerate the discomfort that followed honest self-expression.
Her relationships remained intact as she began asking for what she needed and setting clearer boundaries.
The longer-term cost
Borrowing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s language, some of us have spent years maintaining a form of “negative peace”: keeping visible tension low while fairness remains absent.
We keep the peace at work and at home, often by absorbing more, asking for less, and leaving difficult things unsaid. Meanwhile, resentment builds, our ambitions remain private, and others continue making decisions based on an incomplete understanding of us.
Avoiding self-advocacy may protect you in the short term, but over time you quietly give up one of the most important levers you have for building an authentic life.
I thought I was protecting my integrity and relationships by resisting self-advocacy, avoiding anything that felt like workplace politics, and settling for negative peace. In reality, I was giving up a critical lever for building a life that felt authentic to me.
When we do not express what we value, others infer our priorities from what we accept.
When we do not make our aspirations known, others assume the role we already play is the role we want.
When we do not correct incomplete narratives about our contribution, the judgment, influence, and strategic thinking behind our work can remain invisible, and those narratives shape future decisions.
When we do not express our needs, relationships organize themselves around what others assume we can absorb.
Over time, self-protection becomes self-limitation.
How avoiding self-advocacy can turn short-term self-protection into long-term self-limitation.
The spiral often begins with a reasonable desire to avoid conflict, judgment, or disapproval. But staying quiet leaves other people with a less accurate picture of who we are, what we contribute, and what we want.
That can mean less useful feedback, less aligned support, and fewer opportunities that reflect our actual aspirations. Over time, the resulting disappointment, resentment, and self-doubt can make the next act of advocacy feel even riskier.
Eventually, we may find ourselves living inside choices shaped more by other people’s assumptions and comfort than by our own values, hopes, and aspirations.
That is the long-term cost of avoiding self-advocacy.
Put This Into Action
Think of one act of self-advocacy you have been postponing because you fear appearing demanding, creating tension, or changing a relationship.
Ask yourself:
What am I protecting by staying silent?
What is my silence costing me?
What is one honest thing I could say without trying to resolve everything at once?
For engineering leaders, notice which people consistently absorb extra work, minimize their contributions, or avoid asking for what they want. Their silence may look like contentment when it is actually caution. Create room for them to speak candidly, but do not assume that one invitation will be enough to shift their sense of safety.
If this article helped you recognize what makes self-advocacy feel uncomfortable or risky for you, I would love to hear which part resonated.
What Emerged From the First Uncharted Office Hours
The first Uncharted Office Hours filled to its 25-person capacity, with 15 people attending from across the career spectrum, from early-career engineers to Staff and Principal engineers, and a CTO.
Seeing that breadth of experience reinforced something I observe repeatedly in coaching: the need for thoughtful career support does not disappear as we become more senior. The questions simply change.
Three conversations from the session stayed with me, each beginning with a different career question.
One engineer wanted to move from a service-based company to a product company. Some of the barriers he faced were structural, including recruiters filtering his background. As we talked, another issue emerged: he was explaining what he had done without making his judgment, strategic thinking, or technical vision visible.
Another engineer asked how I had built trust throughout my career. She initially described herself as friendly and technically strong, but later shared that she experienced social anxiety and believed she had always been that way. I invited her to consider how much that long-standing story might be shaping her willingness to build relationships at work, especially while navigating the additional complexity of being the only woman on her team.
A third engineer had spent more than two years feeling blocked from becoming a tech lead. Her manager was not supporting the move, while her skip-level continued sending her back to the same stalled relationship. We discussed bringing all three people into one conversation and how she could prepare for that meeting.
These conversations reminded me that the first problem we name is rarely the whole growth edge. Sometimes a useful next step begins by understanding what is actually keeping the situation stuck.
You’re welcome to join the next Uncharted Office Hours on Thursday, September 3, from 12–1 p.m. Pacific Time.
If this edition resonated, I help engineers navigate these exact challenges through 1:1 coaching and a live course on behavioral interviews.
If you’re interested in exploring whether structured coaching support would be a good fit, reply to this email to ask about a 60-minute Clarity & Strategy Session. I’ll follow up with next steps.
If you’d like more essays like this, you can read past editions here.
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Personalized Coaching for Senior, Staff, and Principal Engineers by a former Staff Engineer
A newsletter for Senior+ engineers doing strong work but not always seeing it translate into recognition, broader scope, or career momentum. Also useful for engineering leaders who want clearer language for developing these skills in their teams. Subscribe for thoughtful essays on influence, visibility, self-advocacy, and Staff-level growth.