The committee can only promote what it can read

Promotions 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 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. The difference is between a line that says "helped evaluate a shared SDK" and a line that says what you decided, who owned each side, and where the decision record lives.