Hacker News Reader

it’s _very_ easy to calculate your impact, or the one of your team, when you work on meaningful projects. if that’s not the case, you are probably working on non-essential things.

View on HN

I think that's rather naive. A lot of work engineers do involves either keeping systems afloat or minor alterations that in cohort lead to a new feature but each minor alterations itself not doing anything meaningful. Evaluating individual or even team impact in those cases is _hard_. Yes, product people or in some cases managers do it but most of their numbers come with five asterisks to cover their asses as they are largely bs.

There are definitely people who are impactful enough and deserve to make bold "I" statements but they are in the vast minority.

Down to the lines of code written? Your product may get millions in revenue, but you wrote a single module out of hundreds, how much % do you take credit for?

Also it sounds like a toxic culture if you have to constantly try to tie your day-to-day work directly to how it impacts new revenue and profits or else your work is considered worthless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com