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"At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company"

You would think that, but decades of experience have disproved that.

Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded by engineers, is non-technical.

Most are (more or less) aware that somewhere technical engineering in software is needed, but they feel that as a threath rather than an asset. If engineering is not a commodity, they fear being called out for not being in touch with the grounded reality of the business, and fear the unpredictability this entails for their own operation.

So they will tend to treat engineering like a commodity, generic and interchangable at will, and even deliberatly not recognize differential contribution by engineers to the company's success.

This is also why once non-technical management has consolidated, rising from engineering into management will become very difficult, often requiring you deny your technical competences.

> At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company (directly or indirectly).

I really wish it were like that, but IMHO it's more of an exception to the rule than the rule. At least this is my experience of being an engineer and a manager.

My software engineer job is to destroy my own position by solving all the problems and automating the job away. I have done it multiple times over my career.

> It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you get paid for work because it’s important

Is it? Maybe I'm out of touch, or used to a different work culture (non-US, consultant), but that's kinda obvious, you're paid because you make money.

Also, no one that knows a single teacher or nurse would ever fall into the trap of thinking that salary is proportional to job importance.

> If your work isn’t clearly connected to company profit, your position is unstable

In my experience, only salespeople are clearly connected to profit. Everyone else is percieved as a cost.

> In other words, you’re probably depending on a kind-hearted manager (or CEO) who personally values your work.

Yes, this is the position for everybody except salepeople. Which means, in turn, that focusing your efforts to make the company profitable, as the articles advocates, is a grave mistake. You should focus on making your immediate manager profitable and successful. (For those who are fresh out of school, this is often a wildly different goal.)

The only situation in which the article’s advice makes any sense is if your immediate manager is also the company owner, who benefits personally and immediately if the company’s profits go up.

My pet peeve in this area that pretty much always gets overlooked by technical people even if they're somewhat experienced in management and business, is compliance. It's always good and profitable to adapt to and preferably implement representations of laws and regulations, including 'soft' rules, like standard contracts, established business practices, non-compulsory laws, things like that.

Even if no customer today cares about something, a form of employee compensation that is a bit unusual, say, or 'reversed' VAT declaration in invoicing, or whatever, if large actors in your segment do, and that's most likely the case, then you should at least build things based off the formalities in the local jurisdiction so that when your sales people get a big prospect on the hook you'll have an easy time adding what they need.

It can also shield from legal or financial liabilities if someone gets angry at you, and your lawyer will be happier and possibly cheaper if they know you understand your legal environment. If you're doing an exit buyers will also appreciate good compliance, just like they appreciate other forms of risk management.

I think this is a problem that arises from people working in these gargantuan organisations where individuals can't see how their work contributes to the success of the organisation. They perceive the organisation as a construct built around social relationships rather than a construct that exists to drive some change in or generate profit from the surrounding economy, because they can't see how their work drives that change or generates that profit.

The whole trend of cracking FAANG/MAANG interviews has made this notion of not having self-awareness/understanding of where money comes far more entrenched. Folks who crack these interviews feel like they are passing sermons from top of 'tech' hill to other noobs, not knowing in effect that their minuscule value is as long is company is making profit. The day that stops, everyone's job is on the line and especially folks who are away from centers which make money.

The article makes good career advice in general: understand what pays your salary, and contribute enough such that your costs are offset by your labor. For engineers, that means understanding how the company makes money, or how you can save the company money, and then focusing on those things.

As many, many others have pointed out however, modern companies, especially modern tech companies, aren't operating from that mindset. Presently they're all championing products for the sake of the product itself, rather than sticking to their profit centers. It's why everyone for the past decade or so has engaged in a "checkbox race" of adding the latest fad to their product suite, regardless of its value to said product or its customers in the first place. Likewise, internal politics has shifted to prioritize those working on the "right" product, as opposed to recognizing those who create the most value. It's a large reason why enshittification continues to grow: leadership doesn't care about value, product, or engineering, so much as they want the latest shiny thing to add to their sale sheet and make the Board and/or Shareholders "happy".

My own data points supporting this theory:

* Cutting a cost-center's AWS costs by 60% and saving the equivalent of my TC every 2.5 months (~$1.3m/year) got me sent to the Private Cloud team

* Building multi-cloud showback wasn't recognized because I wasn't on the Public Cloud team (a new team rebuilt it two years after I'd finished it)

* Building a Cloud-as-a-Service model with AI Agent hooks got me RIFed

So to add a caveat to the OPs own article for others based on my own experiences: if your organization isn't prioritizing value regardless of origin, your position is unstable. In those cases, you need to either find a way onto the "right" team if the company is important to you, or you need to brush up your resume and find an exit post-haste. Creating value in a company that doesn't acknowledge or respect it is a huge red flag that I naively thought tech companies ("we're a meritocracy!") wouldn't display, but I was gravely mistaken.

Are any jobs really secure? You still need to show output if you’re in a profit center, and sometimes things happen outside your control.

More commentary below:

https://open.substack.com/pub/therosen/p/knowing-where-your-...

Mackenzie’s analysis holds a grain of truth and remains too simplistic.

If you work at a company whose notion of value is purely dividends, get out.

The aviation industry didn’t get profitable without regulation. Safety is a big part of the value generated. Spending on safety is not spending money putting more butts in seats and selling more tickets faster. But few people will choose to fly if the risk to their safety is too great.

Software does have similar responsibilities. People hate losing their money, having their private data leaked, having their entire production run screwed up because of a software error. It can cost a business a lot of money. Cutting corners to bring new features to the table doesn’t exactly add to the value the company brings to their customers. You also need to respect their privacy, do what's required to avoid security errors, programming errors, etc.

Update: This article, and Mackenzie's advice, is decent if you're trying to survive at such a company and you can't get out yet.. for reasons. But I would aim your career towards getting out at some point because such a company will never value your work.

I think the biggest career mistake engineers make -- myself included -- is assuming your contributions will be automatically recognized when in fact the amount of credit you receive is equal to how much you contributed multiplied by the amount of attention you draw to it.

This sort of thing is why I decided to do research so I could work at universities and small startups! I figured that way I could be away from the corruption and selfishness that exists in large tech companies.

Then my whole department got defunded. More fool me.

Metrics for things like FCP, better screenreader and refactor are less straightforward so having the capability to correctly evaluate the cost and benefits, making the right judgement calls and communicating it to everyone is vital.

Not mentioned in the article but this implies the importance of hiring. Having the right people to build the culture together, sitting in the room to discuss the priority of these things can turn a filibuster popping clown fiesta into productively working out actual competitive advantages for the company.

It's very surprising to me that this needs to be said - but maybe that's because I've mostly worked in, let's say, 'resource constrained' environments. You focus on the stuff that keeps the money coming, or people start losing their jobs.

Anecdotally, working in profit centres (and being a productive member of said centres) somewhat protected me from large layoffs, but that’s pretty much it. There isn’t much otherwise that ever shielded me (or any of my team members, as a team lead somewhat involved in these decisions) from being expensive line items, in the eyes of people some levels above my pay grade taking business decisions looking at a balance sheet.

This article offers advice for ICs. Well-meaning managers should remember to set up the analytics to connect work to revenue. That which is not measured is not valued, so be sure to measure what matters.

I usually tell new hires this often; understand how this company makes money. Is engineering seen as a necessary cost or income multiplier on the balance sheet. In most companies, it falls in the land of IT, a cost center.

Well said. Young engineers must understand that there is no problem more sales can't fix. Your brilliant solution to problem X must pass the sales test for it to be considered a true success story for your company.

Interesting article. I’m currently trying to justify “tech debt” to upper management. The way I try to communicate it: we can move faster and better on business requirements if we delete unused code/upgrade legacy dependencies/etc. Both need to happen at the same time, though, and that’s where it gets hard: “this feature request would be so much easier if I upgraded to Angular vlatest” runs the risk of always paying tech debt and never providing value.

I have often ended up working on the billing system - nobody cares if it functions and I don't know why. It pulls in the money every month and if it makes mistakes the company loses money.........!!!!.....

In the same companies people do care about the UI ...even when it has about 2-3 unique users per day. I won't explain how this translates to being able to function as a company at all - just to say it does because most selling is actually through salespeople.

So what I get from the OP's dose of "realism" is that everything is about perception and hopes for the future etc. The things that are making money now are assumed to be able to carry on doing so forever without attention. Just as some people buy a car and never look after it. When the day of disaster comes they're surprised.

Some companies implement new features to make a sale. So there's a continual struggle to complicate an already complicated system......but you're not allowed to refactor or spend time upgrading from gcc 4.3 or whatever because that's not work that leads to a sale. So each new feature takes more and more effort of course....and when you lose developers their replacements don't understand the convoluted codebase so bugs can't be fixed and customers don't renew their contracts.

So you do need to work for profitable companies rather than the kind of slow motion car-crash companies that are trying to do something which cannot really support itself.

> At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company

If you look at what it actually takes to get promoted at most tech companies I’d say this isn’t generally true at many big tech companies.

Being on a very lucrative part of the product may not get you as much “impact” on your promotion packet as if you are working on a platform/infra touching the whole org. Even if that platform isn’t generating the company much money even indirectly.

I work on a product that has been built over 25 years. Lots of the work I did years ago is to ensure the product longevity.

Lots of the work I do now is to ensure it lasts another 25 years. Thats good, but its only the start of "my work".

It's up to me to "sell" that benefit to upper management. There's no point in assuming they'll figure it out by accident. Part of my job is enumerating the value I add.

By all means work on technical debt. But be sure to make a compelling case as to how the eradication of that debt will impact the project over the next decade. Try and throw in immediate results as well (faster, more reliable, reduced support) but more importantly translate that into terms that measure the improvement in cold hard cash.

This article makes the naive assumption that "what is making money" is an objective thing.

Once a company reaches a certain size, basically once it has a financial planning department w/ different VPs owning their PnL, who is making money increasingly becomes a social construct. "how to get promoted" by spakhm is much more closer to how a large, successful org works IMO: https://spakhm.substack.com/p/how-to-get-promoted

I've seen this in my career multiple times. For example, when I was involved in search for some companies, we would demonstrate through A/B testing that we would make X more money per month. Executive team changed, they decided that "A/B test does not work and slows us down", the definition of making money changed, we overnight went from a money-aking org to a cost center.

Nowadays, most companies are pushing GenAI everywhere. Most of those things don't make money, and yet a lot of promotions will be obtained across the board until the tune ends.

I have no words. this is just… so sad.

"What are tech companies?"

The author never answers this question. He suggests that small groups of people run them but he does not elucidate what are tech compaines.

If a so-called "tech" company is not profitable, and this may comprise the vast majority of them, then the "engineer salary" comes from VC money. Essentially, a loan. The author omits this simple truth as well.

> I regularly see stories like “I convinced my idiot bosses to finally let me do only tech debt work, and would you believe they fired me after a few months?”

> “it’s so unfair that I haven’t been promoted - look at all this amazing accessibility/standards/open-source work I’ve been doing!”

Stories like these might exist, but I genuinely haven't seen a story like either case.

Oof this article hits like a kick to the nuts.

Ive been unhappy with my career growth in past several years, and basically it’s because I worked on products / projects that did not make a ton of money.

I knew this intellectually of course, work on revenue generating things, but emotionally I gravitate toward such reasons that it’s good for customer, or this is high risk / high reward, it’s more interesting, etc.

If I had kept this heuristic as my North Star, I would be further ahead and making more money.

I’m not sure if emotionally I could have done it - I was offered a management position if I moved OFF a high revenue product, so that would’ve been hard to say no to. But in the long run, with hindsight, it would’ve been the right choice.

From the perspective of the business, you need to generate more money than your wage plus whatever else expenses that are associated with your employment. This surplus is what adds up to the profit.

Let’s just put the simplistic “be a profit center” thing at face value. The funny thing is that you can generate 10% surplus or 5X surplus. The difference in benefit to the company is large. But your benefit might not be much. Maybe a wage increase, maybe not. Maybe better job security.

Now others have already questioned the “profit center” line here. With so much alienation in the work force it becomes laughable to claim that you can point to a group of individuals as “the profit center” or “the cost center”. This reeks of political jockying. Is Sales the profit center? Without Sales nothing would be sold... but without Engineering there would be no product.

What ends up happening is that the people who insist the loudest are the ones who get promoted to Profit Center. Maybe.

Running companies like this is how you end up with the current state of Boeing. Only valuing engineers who are directly earning you profit and firing the ones who only have an indirect role in your profit centers.

> If your work isn’t clearly connected to company profit, your position is unstable

You know what really makes your position unstable as an engineer? Delaying a product over "safety" concerns, thereby doing work that's clearly connected to preventing company profit. Only young, bright-eyed engineers would be naive enough to bring up safety concerns right?

> If you want your work to be valued (i.e. you don’t want to be reshuffled or fired), and you want to work on personally-satisfying features like accessibility, or UI polishing, or anything else not directly connected to profit - you need to go and work for a very profitable company.

"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI." -Tim Cook

Except that not-very-profitable Apple of the 1990s still cared about accessibility, UI, industrial design (PowerBook, Duo/dock, Newton, eMate...), and sustainability, even before the return of Steve Jobs and their subsequent meteoric rise. In the short run it probably looked like bad business, but Jony Ive started out on the Newton, after all...

Replace "profitable" with "popular with management" and you're right on the money. Just don't get caught holding the hot potato when the wind shifts. And good luck figuring out when that is.

Reading this from somewhere that "engineer" is a protected title (Canada), this is a weird read.

I vaguely remember the engineering code of ethics, I'm pretty sure it goes against most things expressed in this post.

These Silicon Valley folks really ought to read some Marx.

If low-level workers are a 'cost centre', why don't companies just get rid of them? Wouldn't they be more profitable if they removed everyone outside the 'profit centre' of senior management? Obviously not.

OK, now explain where management's salary comes from.

They don't produce anything, at best they're taste arbiters and at worst parasitic middle men that happen to control the budget; funny how that always means they get more of it.

The best long term performing companies are run by technical people that happen to be competent managers. As soon as the professional managerial class takes over they quickly figure out their most profitable move is to cheapen out on engineering and trade in the future for bonuses right now; they'll be long gone when the company craters.

> They throw themselves into various pieces of work that don’t make money ... better screenreader support

Truth hurts lol.

This I think is where Capitalism is at odds with a lot of people's intrinsic values. Accessibility unarguable improves people's lives and many people are in software to make the world better but yeah if you want to make as much money (or maybe just more money) doesn't mean working on even a useful item; just a much demanded one.

I mean, I've never worked with a project manager who generated one iota of business value... Just stirring up drama, inserting themselves into decisions that they can't understand, and calling unnecessary meetings with management that they should be handling on their own. I think there's a lot to be said for simple visibility to management. Also, ignorant overconfidence seems to be something that management loves.

The anomaly here are AI researchers