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4 Best Practices to Get Paid What You’re Worth

4 Best Practices to Get Paid What You’re Worth

Make your impact visible—build your brag doc, tell scope stories, and negotiate with data to grow your influence and worth.

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Even in a tough market, visibility compounds. Here are 4 best practices to help you make that visibility intentional, structured, and sustainable.

1. Build it as you go

Don’t wait for the promo season. Keep a living brag doc with four sections:

  • Scope map: What you own, depend on, and unblock.

    • 🪄 Prompt: Could a new hire understand your sphere of responsibility in 5 minutes?

  • Impact receipts: Business, reliability, or user happiness outcomes.

    • If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen.

  • Influence and multipliers: How you scale others (docs, mentorship, automation).

    • 🪄 Prompt: What keeps working when you’re not in the room?

  • Growth tracker: How you’ve expanded your scope and skill.

    • 🪄 Prompt: Learn → Apply → Stretch

Tip: Add one bullet per section monthly. Link evidence: dashboards, ADRs, demos.

2. Tell scope stories, not task lists

Promo committees don’t care about Jira velocity. They care about growth in the surface area of impact.

Example:

  • From “Built feature X” → “Designed a platform for features X–Z.”

  • From “Fixed outages” → “Cut MTTR 40% with new runbooks.”

3. Know the market

Staff+ engineers negotiate from data, not instinct:

  • Check Levels.fyi, Blind, and peers.

  • Learn your internal leveling guide.

  • Time your asks (budgets reset > layoffs).

Good prep turns emotion-driven requests into data-backed discussions.

4. Negotiate with impact and options

Stay factual and calm:

  • “This system saved $X/month and reduced support tickets by Y%.”

  • “I’d love to keep growing here—though I’ve seen comp ranges around [market rate] for this scope.”

These conversations go best when grounded in evidence and curiosity about alignment, not pressure.

Visibility is your responsibility

You can’t rely on others to connect the dots between your impact and your value. Visibility is your job. It’s how you protect your scope, earn trust, and stay aligned with the opportunities you’ve outgrown.

Build your brag doc like you ship code: iteratively, with receipts. Tell stories that scale, know your worth, and negotiate with the right context.

Quiet impact is admirable, but only visible impact gets funded.

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