The committee can only promote what it can read

Promotions are not decided in the room with your manager. They are decided by people who have never worked with you, reading a document.

This is the mechanism behind the most common career stall I see: the senior doing staff-level work with nothing on paper. The unblocking happened in DMs. The architecture call happened in a meeting with no RFC. The 2am save had three witnesses who went back to sleep.

Enormous impact, zero evidence. Meanwhile an engineer with half the impact and a tidy trail of RFCs, written decisions, and review comments walks through calibration and takes the title.

That is not politics beating merit. It is written merit beating spoken merit.

The fix is a habit, not a campaign: every significant decision you influence, write it down where others can see it. A short RFC, a decision comment on the PR, a post-incident note. One paragraph counts. You are not bragging, you are creating the record the committee will eventually read.