Not always. Frequently, the connection between code that’s written today and revenue tomorrow is tenuous and difficult to package in a way that says “look at me

Not always. Frequently, the connection between code that’s written today and revenue tomorrow is tenuous and difficult to package in a way that says “look at me! I’m valuable!” And, then there are those somewhat rare occasions where a project is not intended to increase revenue, and may even decrease it. At my last employer, we guesstimated that a project I worked on for months could possibly have ended up costing us $2M per year in revenue. That was both accepted and expected, because we were doing it to gain goodwill with users, but in such a way that it might end up pissing off a small minority of our customers. I really wish, just once, I could work on a project and put underneath it on my resume “Increased revenue by X%,” because I’ve never worked on anything that was so easy to directly trace back to the top line. Cost savings are another story, because engineers can fairly easily quantify how much less money is being spent by doing $THING a bit more efficiently....