I was recently speaking on a panel at an event for software engineers who recently got laid off.

You could feel the tension in the room. Smart people. Solid experiences. But the same question kept coming up in different forms:

How do you stand out when companies have hundreds of qualified candidates to choose from?

My answer was simple.

The narrative you can build around your career and how you convey it is what will make you stand out.

Your narrative is more than what you’ve done or how many years of experience you have.

Its the story you can tell about your work and why it mattered.

This has always been important, but right now? It's becoming critical.

Let me break down what I mean and how you can use it to your advantage.

Your narrative has two parts.

The first part of your narrative is translation.

A lot of people describe their work in a way that only their team or people internal to the company would understand.

That barely works even inside the company if it’s a large organization.

If you tell me you worked on something I've never heard of, I will be lost.

I won't understand what you did, why it mattered, or why I should care.

Your job is to translate your work into something anyone can grasp, especially in the context of what they care about.

You have to anchor your work to something the listener already understands.

When I talk about my work on Office 365's Substrate layer at Microsoft, I don't dive into the technical architecture.

Instead, I connect it to products people use every day— Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, and the Office suite.

I explain how my role powered the underlying data platform and link it to experiences they understand.

Suddenly, they get it.

When I mention my networking automation work, I don't say "I upgraded operating systems on network devices." I say, "You know how your iphone gets new versions of IOS occasionally?

I did that for network device like routers, firewalls and switches—except at massive scale across entire regions of network infrastructure, without breaking connectivity.

Same work. Different framing. Completely different level of clarity.

That is translation.

The second part of your narrative is signaling complexity and value.

Once they understand what you did, help them understand how hard it was and why it mattered.

This is where you show the depth of your experience—the constraints you worked within, the scale you operated at, the tradeoffs you navigated.

Going back to my networking example: I'd add, "The challenge was that we couldn't update all devices in a region simultaneously—if we did, we'd take down critical services. So we had to design a phased rollout strategy that kept everything running while we upgraded thousands of devices from different vendors."

I'd also add that the process used to take around 4 days but the systems I built did it in around 15 mins.

Now the listener understands that this was not just “updating devices.” It was high stakes.

They're hearing about someone who thinks through risk, operates at scale, and solves complex problems under real constraints and thinks in terms of value.

That framing changes how people perceive you.

Companies today need people who can do more with less. They have their pick from a pool of a lot of qualified candidates.

If your narrative demonstrates the qualities they are looking for clearly without them needing to prob it from you, you're already ahead of most candidates.

The narrative around the projects you build outside of work matters too. But that is a conversation for another day.

Thanks for reading.

Talk soon.

Uma

P.S.

If you’re serious about tightening up your narrative and learning how to communicate your value in a way that lands, that’s the kind of work we do inside The Code Room.

We workshop positioning, refine how you talk about your projects, and turn your experience into a story that carries weight in interviews and promo conversations. Come join us.​

P.p.s
Marathon training is going well. Here's a picture from a recent track session. I have my longest run of the training cycle (15 miles) this weekend. Wish me luck.