For Senior ICs
You do the work that makes the team function — the design reviews, the onboarding, the “quick question” that saves someone two days — and then watch the promotion packet ask for “technical accomplishments” as if none of that happened. Staff+ progression runs on influence, visibility, and evidence, and all three are things engineers are told to feel vaguely embarrassed about pursuing. The quiet fear: doing career-defining work that no one, including future-you, can point to.
bettersense is the pointing-to system.
Your starter kit
Section titled “Your starter kit”Five skills. The rest will find you when a situation matches.
| When it fires | What it does for you | |
|---|---|---|
wins-log | ”I shipped X” / “I unblocked Y” / “I talked us out of Z” | Structured capture — situation, action, impact, evidence — while the details are fresh. The raw material for every future promo packet, self-eval, and interview story. |
glue-audit | ”Where does my time actually go?” | Catalogs and quantifies your non-core work — mentoring, docs, unblocking — with a promotion-value read and a fairness check. Makes the invisible third of your job legible. |
influence-without-authority | Driving an architecture change across teams | The staff+ core skill: coalitions, interests vs. positions, pushing back on a principal without burning the relationship. |
the-rfc-reviewer | Before you publish the design doc | A senior-staff-grade review of your own RFC — gaps, unstated assumptions, the objection you haven’t pre-empted — before your reviewers find them for you. |
weekly | Friday, 15 minutes | Wins captured, one stakeholder reflected on (yes, ICs have stakeholders — your manager, your skip, the peer team’s tech lead), patterns surfaced. |
A week with bettersense
Section titled “A week with bettersense”Tuesday. You spend half a day helping the new hire trace a gnarly race condition. Old you: that half-day evaporates. New you: thirty seconds Friday logging it (category: mentorship, evidence: their PR merged next morning).
Wednesday. Your cross-team proposal to consolidate the two event pipelines needs the other team’s lead on side, and he’s skeptical. influence-without-authority reframes: his stated position is “too risky this quarter”; his interest is not being left holding the migration pager. Address the interest, not the position.
Thursday. RFC draft done. the-rfc-reviewer finds the rollback section is hand-waving and the capacity math assumes a peak that contradicts your own graph. Better you find it than the principal engineer does, in public.
Friday, 3pm. /bettersense:weekly. Three wins logged in five minutes. A pattern: this is the fourth week running that reactive support work displaced your promo-critical project. That’s not a mood — it’s cited, dated evidence for the workload conversation with your manager. glue-audit can turn it into numbers when you’re ready.
When you’re ready for more
Section titled “When you’re ready for more”- The packet:
wins-curateremixes the log into a promo case, STAR interview stories, or a self-eval;promo-case-gluespecifically frames glue work as technical leadership. - Career direction:
the-career-coachfor the honest staff-vs-management-vs-depth conversation with yourself. - First-time setup: run
/bettersense:start— profile, one stakeholder, this kit.