How many times have you looked back at a quarter and thought, I did a lot of good work there , only to realize you can’t actually reconstruct most of it? That’s the problem. Not that the work didn’t happen. Not that it wasn’t valuable. The problem is that by the time review season comes around, the details are gone. The exact metrics. The decisions you pushed for. The tradeoffs you navigated. The people you unblocked. The work that made everything else easier. And once that information fades, your promotion packet gets weaker. That’s what I mean by memory fade . It’s the gap between the impact you actually had and the impact people can still remember when it matters. The part nobody tells you Engineers tend to assume good work will speak for itself. In practice, it rarely does. Some of your work disappears because people forget. Some of it disappears because it was invisible in the first place.…