Unique Value: How to get noticed at work

Get noticed at work by adding unique value

I joined Google in 2014 as a software engineer on one of the Ads teams in London. As I started to get to know the three other people on my team, one thing quickly became clear. See if you can guess my feelings from the notes I took about my team:

John: Tech lead. Bootstrapped this team. Widely regarded as the area expert.
Aleksy: Senior engineer. Wrote a Haskell compiler last weekend (literally)
Igor: Started last quarter. About to ship his first project. ICPC world finalist from Belarus.

Anurag: Overwhelmed as fuck.

Naturally, I struggled to find my footing in the team. The other engineers on the team were not only very smart, but also established experts in our area and tech stack. There was hardly any occasion where I could answer a question, or share an opinion without someone else doing so in a much more refined manner.

Until… About three months after my joining, my team decided to hold a two day hackathon to build a proxy for intercepting browser requests, needed to run some automated tests. One of the tasks in the project was to process a large text file of URLs, and remove the timestamp from each URL that belonged to Google.

E.g:
http://subdomain.domain.com/file.js/queryParams&timestamp&params

My TL created a task to write a processor in Java, and they estimated that it would take ~4 hours to do this end to end.

Now, I had a little secret. My team didn’t know that I have a black belt in regular expressions. Since getting introduced to them in college, I always found them interesting, and applied them wherever I could, sometimes even when I shouldn’t have!
Almost everyday I used to give myself text processing puzzles, and would solve them using regexes. So much so that when I typed ‘r’ into Chrome’s address bar, the top suggestion was regex101.com, and not reddit!

My eyes lit up as soon as I saw the URL conversion problem, and combined with a few GNU utilities came up with this one liner to solve it:

cat urls |\ 
grep -E "https{0,1}:\/\/[a-z]*\.?google\.com" |\ 
sed -E 's/[&?]?timestamp=[0-9]+//g' > converted_urls

It’s been more than eight years, and I still remember Aleksy saying “that’s a scary one-liner you have there”. He found it scary! The person who wrote a Haskell compiler as a side-project last weekend found it scary!

My team was expectedly happy that I saved them a few engineering hours, but this isn’t really a “happily ever after” kind of a story, and I had to continue working hard to establish myself.

However, something changed that day. I started to grow more confident in the skillset I brought to the table, and other engineers started to come to me with their Linux/Bash scripting /text processing questions. This happened because I had a unique and valuable skill.

Adding unique value

The skills you use to add unique value will depend on your team and project. Since the things you are already good at might not be unique in your situation, use the following tips to find how to add unique value:

1. Ask your team / manager

Simply asking “What skills could our project/team benefit from” is a great start. Don’t be surprised if people go into thinking mode because teams rarely stop to think about the skills they lack as a group. Your initiative would undoubtedly be appreciated.

2. Build ancillary skills

Having a repertoire of ancillary skills will significantly increase your chances of adding unique value in many different situations. Here are a few examples of such skills for software engineering like roles:

1. Data processing: Even basic SQL proficiency is surprisingly rare at junior levels, and problems that require SQL rarely have elegant solutions otherwise.
2. Documentation: Tech companies, especially established ones rely heavily on documents to communicate designs and decisions. Ability to produce succinct and helpful documents will quickly get you noticed.
3. Release infrastructure: Above average functional knowledge of your release infrastructure and tools would be a life-saver during rollout emergencies. Your colleagues won’t be able to thank you enough.

There are many many more skills that supplement coding, the above three examples are just to get you thinking.

3. Look for failure patterns

History repeats itself, but often when there’s an underlying cause. Look for failure patterns in your team, and the skills it would take to prevent them. Here are a few examples of symptoms, and what skills might be lacking:

1. Delayed projects: Planning, estimation, good coding practices.
2. User facing bugs: Unit/end-to-end testing, refactoring, pushing back on requirements.
3. Hero culture: Documentation, knowledge sharing, mentoring.

Starting on a new job, role or team is hard. An attitude of trying to add unique value has worked well for me at Google. Reach out on LinkedIn if you have other ideas on how to get noticed at work, feedback on this post, or any questions.