How I Built Credibility as a Tech Lead
The quiet technical habits that made me impossible to ignore.
I was looking down, minding my own business, when an engineer across the room pointed at me.
“Has anyone noticed this new guy?”
I didn’t move.
We were in a sprint retrospective—forty engineers packed into one of Yahoo’s big conference rooms. Our director, Vivek, stood silently in the back, arms crossed like a judge. Three managers sat near the front, scrolling through charts and safe answers. Everyone knew we’d missed the last three sprints. No one wanted to talk about why.
I’d only been on the team a few weeks.
After what happened the last time I engaged in meeting like this, I kept my head down.
Read it here:
They moved me to Santa Clara after the Burbank layoffs. Everyone else from my team was gone.
I thought this would be a reset.
Instead, I was being pointed at like a bug in the system.
“Look at this.”
The engineer clicked into the burndown dashboard.
The chart lit up on the screen—my name, clean line, no dips. Perfect velocity, week over week. In a room full of noise, I was the only constant.
He didn’t have to say the rest.
But he did.
“He’s closing the most story points. Consistently. That’s not normal.”
I kept my eyes on the keyboard. But the room shifted. Chairs creaked. Heads turned.
All eyes landed on me.
My heart pounded. I’d felt this before.
Curtis. The fake praise. The setup. The laughter.
I reached for my headphones. Stood up.
I had no speech planned. But I wasn’t going to let someone else tell my story.
I’d been working quietly for weeks: cleaning up files, refactoring, reorganizing code no one wanted to touch. It wasn’t strategy. It was how I stayed sane in systems that made no sense.
So I confessed:
“For every feature I work on, I create a new file. I move over the working code. Clean it up. Then implement the feature.”
Blank stares.
“JSPs, HTML, Tiles, CSS, JavaScript—it’s all crammed into the same file. We say we have standards. We don’t follow them. So I make the page readable first.”
Still no reaction.
“It’s slower in the beginning. But by the second or third feature, the patterns show up. I reuse them.”
Someone near the front leaned forward.
“But if you’re doing all that extra work... why are you still faster than everyone else?”
I held the floor.
“I’ve worked in a lot of codebases. Contract work. Three months here, six months there. You don’t get context. You get chaos. You learn to move anyway.”
“So I fix what I can. Early. Before the mess can catch up.”
Another voice from the side of the room:
“So you’re refactoring on your own time?”
“I’m refactoring to save time. It’s slower in week one. Not in week three.”
I let it hang for a second. Then added:
“I also built some macros to handle boilerplate. I’ll share them.”
That cracked the tension. A few people smiled. One guy leaned forward and said “Macros?” like I’d handed him something illegal.
That retrospective didn’t get me promoted.
But it made something very clear:
Good work doesn’t speak for itself. It needs a voice.
If you’re a junior reading this someday, here’s what I wish someone had told me: Run toward the mess.
The ugly, unstable codebases? That’s where you learn the most.
Those early projects where nothing makes sense and no one has time to explain anything, that’s where your instincts get built.
And someday, those instincts will carry you through a moment like this one, where you're not being questioned for failing, but for succeeding too quietly.
I didn’t survive the Burbank layoffs because I was lucky.
I survived because a small project I finished in two hours got written up like it should have taken a month.
An exec forwarded the email. My name was in it.
The lesson wasn’t what I did. It was how I told the story before someone else could tell it for me.
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Awesome!
Mine is a similar story, with a difficult start.
I was once staring at a git merge conflict, only few lines but not knowing what to do. Had someone else do it for me with tools I don’t have now.
Only a few days ago, I sat over a big merge conflict I had caused the other day by refactoring some messy code (some brilliant, but vibe coded UI design), and managed to both stay calm and get everything alright on my own!
These lessons teach more than four weeks of learning c++ where everything goes straight!
“Good work doesn’t speak for itself it needs a voice” this is very true and also why I’m trying to get myself out there and be the voice to my good works. 👏👏 I enjoyed reading this.