Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

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"Undervalued" is relative. To Google your skills might be worth $150k because you'd add $1.5m to their revenue. To the business you're in you may 'only' add $500k, so you're paid accordingly. You aren't undervalued so much as under-utilised - the company you're at isn't maximising the value they could get from you in the way Google could (or maybe they are; there is an upper limit). Either find a way to make a bigger impact on your company's bottom line, or change company.

To draw a startup analogy, if you decide you want to take 25% of an established $100m market that's unlikely to happen because that's really hard to do, so people don't value your startup as having a potential $25m revenue. But if you can think of a realistic way to grow that $100m market to being a $125m market then people will readily accept you potentially have a $25m revenue business. Same result, very different impact.

Within your company you need to grow the market for your skills.

So the question then is, how do you add to their revenue? Seek projects that will save them money? Seek projects that will net them additional revenue? How do you make a find a way to make a bigger impact on your companies bottom line?

If you're a developer, the sad truth is that there's probably very little you can do. Even if you removed 100% of the company's infrastructure cost center, it's only a small fraction of your company's total costs.

Unless you are in Sales, Marketing, or Senior Management, there's very little you can ever do to significantly impact revenue.

Not that Senior Management wants you to think that; it's demoralizing when combined with bonuses being withheld due to missed revenue goals.

I do agree that the connection to revenue is much clearer in other departments but that doesn't mean engineering can't impact the bottom line.

Areas where I think good engineering can help include, designing software that minimizes its support costs, attention to code quality to improve customer/users experience, improving up-time, shortening maintenance windows, metrics and telemetry that help marketing and product development understand how a product is being used.

Good product documentation (reference manuals, in-product help, etc) is difficult and often over-looked. This isn't coding but engineering input into documentation is important.

Engineers can also provide significant input into product features and directions.

Sure, we build the product. And without that product, the company is a non-starter. And if we screw it up, we can lose existing customers.

But the product by itself does not produce revenue. Only selling the product makes revenue.

So, at best, we can avoid costing the company money, but we can't make money. Even customer service can have a bigger impact on the bottom line than we do.

Increasing top line revenue is almost always a better path than cutting expenses. (The latter is finite, although sometimes easier to prove specific correlation between action and savings. Until you're working at a company with huge expenses, though, going for growth is better than cost-cutting.)

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