DR

Business for SWEs

Engineers suck at business.

Not all, but many engineers that I’ve worked with seem to want to spend time working on the tasks that they’ve been assigned. They want to think about interesting technical problems and ignore that gross business stuff.

In this post, I want to make the case for why a solid understanding of business concepts is valuable as an engineer.

1X vs. 10X vs. 1000X Engineers

We’ve all heard about 10X engineers. It’s easy to consider what this means from a technical perspective. On a technical level, a 10X engineer gets 10X more work done than a 1X engineer. Or perhaps they can complete tasks that are 10X more difficult.

When you consider a business perspective, it’s very easy to imagine a 10X, 100X, or even 1000X engineer. If a 1X engineer is completing easy features for a software product that is hardly used, the economic value of that work is quite low. Now if another engineer completes a number of substantial features directly used by millions of customers, one could argue that is worth easily 1000X more.

To use an extreme value, the ratio of value produced by a newbie engineer whose project is shelved is worth infinitely less than the value produced by Satoshi Nakamoto who created the $1,000,000,000,000+ market cap asset that is bitcoin.

Your Career as an Investment

All of the time that you invest into your career is an investment. Therefore, you should:

Invest time and energy learning technologies that are going to maximize the business value that you create.

Consider working on projects that are in high demand, with a low supply of people able to do them.

Join companies that are poised to do well in the market and understand their compensation structure at different levels. In particular, understanding equity, stock options, etc. and the pros and cons of joining a big company vs. a small company.

Improve your personal sales and marketing abilities. If you think of yourself as a company, where you are the CEO, CTO, and CFO: how is your sales and marketing department? Are you good at selling the value of your work? Are you good at getting yourself in front of the opportunities that you want? Do you effectively communicate the value of the projects that you’re working on?

Effectively Communicate with Non-Technical Stakeholders

You need to be able to speak with non-technical decision makers. I’ve seen tons of engineers scoff at people with a lack of technical knowledge. It feels great to bathe in their intellectual superiority.

Non-technical folks are often in charge of budgets, timelines, and high-level decisions. The engineer who can clearly communicate technical concepts, demonstrate the importance of different work, translate the monetary value of technical decisions, persuade, and connect will be so much more highly valued than an engineer who cannot communicate well with his non-techy colleagues.

Improve Your Decision Making

Understand the impact of one feature vs. another in terms of business value. What will be their impacts on revenue? How much might they cost to implement?

When people trust your decision making, they will trust you to take on more scope with higher leverage. Greater leverage leads to producing more value for people.

An engineer who makes 7/10 decisions will be put in charge of ~$100k opportunities. An engineer who has proven his ability to make 10/10 decisions regularly will be in charge of ~$100M decisions. They will be compensated accordingly.

Create Things People Want

I love Y Combinator’s motto. We should all strive to make things that people want. It’s easy to focus on technical tasks and to lose sight of the bigger picture. How many people are using what you create? And how valuable do they find your creation?

Over the course of my career, I hope to make plenty of “things people want.”

Helpful Resources