My talk at a youth festival in Perm: how expertise makes you visible

On 21 August 2026, at ER-Telecom's youth festival in Perm, I gave a joint talk with Kirill Pishchalnikov, Vice President for Technical Infrastructure. The talk was titled "Your personal brand inside the company: how expertise makes you visible". Kirill covered strategy, and I spoke about the first steps. I went through that stage myself not long ago and still remember well what it looks like from the inside.

How I opened

I started with an awkward admission. My first year in network operations consisted of on-call shifts and tickets. Everything was done on time and nobody complained. Yet almost nothing from that work remained apart from closed tickets. Good work does not show itself. A manager cannot see how you did the work, only what it produced.

Visibility is more than self-promotion or being a good speaker. It is the path by which the results of your work reach the people who make decisions.

Level one: visible actions

Three rules worked for me.

Ask questions in public. A question in a private message solves the problem once, while the same question in a shared channel helps everyone who runs into it later. During my first month on the backbone team I messaged the duty engineer privately because I was afraid of looking like a newcomer, and I now see that as a mistake.

Offer help beyond your own tasks. Monitoring overlaps between planned maintenance and outages was not part of my job and was not in any plan. That project is what made my work visible outside my department.

Document your decisions. Along with the tool, I wrote down how it works and why it was built that way. The day after the release, colleagues from neighbouring departments were already using it and finding answers to their questions in the documentation.

Level two: visible decisions

The stance "I do what I'm told" feels safe, because then nothing is your fault. That safety comes at a high price. There is nothing to say about your work, and you depend entirely on how well your tasks are defined.

The stance "I make a decision and take responsibility for it" sounds scarier. In practice it means choosing an approach, explaining your choice and naming the risks in advance. You do not need a title for this, and you can make decisions within the scope of your own task from day one.

Here is my own example. Overlaps between planned work and outages used to be found by hand. Engineers opened several sources and compared them by eye, usually when the network was already in trouble and there was no time left. Nobody had asked for a tool. I built a prototype, chose its design myself and came back with a working version. Now the system does the matching and the duty engineer receives a ready answer.

While I was writing the tool, nobody noticed it. Attention came after I presented the result to management and talked about duty engineers' time saved and risks removed. Scripts and libraries barely came up. A task report is remembered for a week. A tool that people use keeps working for years and speaks for its author better than any report.

Six mistakes young engineers make

I made the first three myself.

1. Waiting to be noticed. Your manager has their own workload and is not obliged to guess what you are doing.
2. Reporting tasks instead of impact. "Closed forty tickets" describes how busy you were. "Reduced manual cross-checking to a single action" describes a result. After every statement about your work, it helps to ask yourself what it actually achieved.
3. Staying silent out of fear. A question takes five minutes, while silence can cost weeks of work and someone else's incident.
4. Not recording the starting point. If you do not write down how long a routine task used to take, you will have nothing to prove the result with later.
5. Confusing visibility with noise. The test is simple: imagine your message was never sent and ask whether anyone would notice.
6. Going for a sprint instead of a habit. One big project a year creates a burst of attention that is forgotten within a quarter. Reputation is built from regular actions.

A minimal routine

• Once a week, ask one question or give one answer in public.
• Once a month, write up one explanation of how something works or why it was done a certain way.
• Once a quarter, take on one problem yourself and describe the outcome in terms of time, money or risk.

If you remember only one thing from the talk, start tomorrow. Ask one question in a shared channel and measure how long the routine task that annoys you currently takes. Each of these takes about ten minutes.

Thank you to the festival organizers and to everyone who asked questions. After the talk there were more questions than time to answer them.