Ask HN: What Did You Learn Too Late in Your Tech Career?

You need to make sure management knows your value. Don't assume that they will notice it on their own. I worked with a guy that constantly bragged about how smart he was and his daily accomplishments. I though he was a jerk. I now feel that he knew the system way better than me.

To add to that: there may be nothing more important than your relationship with your manager. To the point that I'd say, if you don't deeply trust your manager, and have a relationship where you can be genuinely open and transparent with him/her, you should find another job. It really makes life a lot better when you and your manager are simpatico and clearly "on the same team" (and "on the same page") and not in a borderline (or outright) adversarial relationship.

Part of this is knowing your own value to the company. Many folks I’ve worked with on the dev side think this means pointing out number of closed tickets or other KPIs. Much better is to understand and show how your work impacts company revenue. If you solve a blocker preventing a major new feature from launching, you should be talking about the new feature you enabled and the new customers that purchased as a result. That’s far more impressive than the ticket closed count which is stupidly easy to game.