4 ms·

> In my experience the boring "I delivered a project very fast with X,Y and Z and saved the company $100mil" will win over "I rearchitected a massive system to

> In my experience the boring "I delivered a project very fast with X,Y and Z and saved the company $100mil" will win over "I rearchitected a massive system to run on microservices Good luck having the opportunity to work in a project where you have even the faintest idea how much money your contribution will make or save. I don't know about you, but never in my 17 year career have I had enough information to even attempt computing these numbers. And even if I could have, it was never part of my job description. So how did you know your numbers? Or if you didn't, how did you made them up for your interviews?

mlhpdx 3y ago
Honest question: if you’ve never known the tangible value of your work, how did you decide what to do? It’s an uncomfortable question to ask, but I genuinely don’t understand how that would be possible.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Your manager tells you? Or, higher up the career ladder, whatever is most urgent for the best-paying customer? Like, I know what's on the list to finish for the next multi-million-dollar payout from a major customer, but how my work contributes to it, compared to work done by 20+ other people involved in dev, operations, qa, deployment, customer negotiations, etc.? Who the fuck knows? Best I can estimate is how much it'll cost the company if I fail to deliver my piece on time.
  - aprdm 3y ago
    At a lot of companies I've worked at, the engineers are empowered to decide on what to work at, it's not like they're 100% booked by PMs. Even if PMs, they can argue. "Your manager tells you what to work on" isn't how big tech runs for the most part, in fact it's a bit sad to think that some people work like that
    - loup-vaillant 3y ago
      It's how most people had me work. It's how most of my colleagues had to work too. Just doing what my manager tells me to work on is what is considered normal and expected in… 8 of the 10 or so places I've worked at. The empowerment you speak of is but a faint dream in my town.
      - aprdm 3y ago
        Interesting. That's different from companies I've worked at, where the sw developer usually asks for clarifications and can fight back if they have something else that they feel should be worked on that has a bigger ROI for the company. Companies I've worked at recently have been much more bottom up than top down
        loup-vaillant 3y ago
        We can definitely ask for clarification. But fighting back is a grounds for being moved up the ax list. One workaround is trying stuff for free and present the results. Free labour for the employer, yay!
aprdm 3y ago
It's crazy that you don't know. I've been in this industry for 20y and apart from when I was extremely junior I always had a sense of the business impact of my work.
- loup-vaillant 3y ago
  Yeah, a sense. A guess. A gut feeling. Based on what exactly? I sure do get a sense of what will require less effort in the long run, or what will makes the user's life easier, or even what is likely to decrease the defect rate… but I dare 95% of programmers, even the subset active here on HN, to reliably assess the monetary impacts of those decisions within one order of magnitude, especially compared to the alternatives. Not to mention the monetary impacts of decisions totally outside my control. I can tell the architect "you suggest A, but B is simpler to use and makes the API 3 times simpler at no loss of functionality", what's the point of estimating the impact of such a no-brainer when the architect answers is "you're correct, but we'll do it my way" (real story)? And how do you expect me to estimate the monetary impact of pointing out that their TPM provisioning is missing a verification step? That stuff happens inside the factory, a problem at this stage is unlikely anyways. And even if I could somehow divine my monetary impact, the best I can say now is "I did good work for this company, they didn't listen to me, and now they're going under". Not even kidding, they are going under. I just ended my gig there because I couldn't take it any more. What are those wonderful places you worked at where you could estimate your impact with reasonable accuracy?
  - aprdm 3y ago
    Napkin math and ROI, no one is asking for the cents. For example, build system improvement on 10% of build time across 200 developers who on average get paid 300k a year - that's a very easy math, no ? Same for time to deploy, improvements on time to fix a bug, etc. etc. You can extrapolate and compare initiatives and projects on t-shirt sizes and ROIs. Knowing where yours sit as well. What places I've worked at ? Mostly business that made some money and were stable.. apart from a start up that was VC funded and made no money
    - 3y ago

mlhpdx 3y ago

Honest question: if you’ve never known the tangible value of your work, how did you decide what to do? It’s an uncomfortable question to ask, but I genuinely don’t understand how that would be possible.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
Your manager tells you? Or, higher up the career ladder, whatever is most urgent for the best-paying customer? Like, I know what's on the list to finish for the next multi-million-dollar payout from a major customer, but how my work contributes to it, compared to work done by 20+ other people involved in dev, operations, qa, deployment, customer negotiations, etc.? Who the fuck knows? Best I can estimate is how much it'll cost the company if I fail to deliver my piece on time.
- aprdm 3y ago
  At a lot of companies I've worked at, the engineers are empowered to decide on what to work at, it's not like they're 100% booked by PMs. Even if PMs, they can argue. "Your manager tells you what to work on" isn't how big tech runs for the most part, in fact it's a bit sad to think that some people work like that
  - loup-vaillant 3y ago
    It's how most people had me work. It's how most of my colleagues had to work too. Just doing what my manager tells me to work on is what is considered normal and expected in… 8 of the 10 or so places I've worked at. The empowerment you speak of is but a faint dream in my town.
    - aprdm 3y ago
      Interesting. That's different from companies I've worked at, where the sw developer usually asks for clarifications and can fight back if they have something else that they feel should be worked on that has a bigger ROI for the company. Companies I've worked at recently have been much more bottom up than top down
      - loup-vaillant 3y ago
        We can definitely ask for clarification. But fighting back is a grounds for being moved up the ax list. One workaround is trying stuff for free and present the results. Free labour for the employer, yay!

aprdm 3y ago

It's crazy that you don't know. I've been in this industry for 20y and apart from when I was extremely junior I always had a sense of the business impact of my work.

loup-vaillant 3y ago
Yeah, a sense. A guess. A gut feeling. Based on what exactly? I sure do get a sense of what will require less effort in the long run, or what will makes the user's life easier, or even what is likely to decrease the defect rate… but I dare 95% of programmers, even the subset active here on HN, to reliably assess the monetary impacts of those decisions within one order of magnitude, especially compared to the alternatives. Not to mention the monetary impacts of decisions totally outside my control. I can tell the architect "you suggest A, but B is simpler to use and makes the API 3 times simpler at no loss of functionality", what's the point of estimating the impact of such a no-brainer when the architect answers is "you're correct, but we'll do it my way" (real story)? And how do you expect me to estimate the monetary impact of pointing out that their TPM provisioning is missing a verification step? That stuff happens inside the factory, a problem at this stage is unlikely anyways. And even if I could somehow divine my monetary impact, the best I can say now is "I did good work for this company, they didn't listen to me, and now they're going under". Not even kidding, they are going under. I just ended my gig there because I couldn't take it any more. What are those wonderful places you worked at where you could estimate your impact with reasonable accuracy?
- aprdm 3y ago
  Napkin math and ROI, no one is asking for the cents. For example, build system improvement on 10% of build time across 200 developers who on average get paid 300k a year - that's a very easy math, no ? Same for time to deploy, improvements on time to fix a bug, etc. etc. You can extrapolate and compare initiatives and projects on t-shirt sizes and ROIs. Knowing where yours sit as well. What places I've worked at ? Mostly business that made some money and were stable.. apart from a start up that was VC funded and made no money
  - 3y ago