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.

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?

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

I rarely got to know the actual deployment scale of anything I've done. Let's make a list:

Ground software for an observation satellite. My internship was about implementing a dead simple neural "network" (2 hidden layers, no feedback), everything was specified from up top, we didn't even get to touch the learning algorithms. Impact? I guess a big flat zero, since all the differentiators was in the learning parameters.

Peer-to-peer social network before Facebook. Never made a cent.

Geographic Information System for the military. I was for obvious reasons not allowed to know enough to estimate the impact of my work. And even then all decisions was made by the customer, and once the user (a different entity) saw the Rube Goldberg contraption we dully made for them they predictably balked, and we did what we could from there. Which was, not that much. I did some useful stuff for sure, but mostly I participated in a system that was arguably worse than the one that preceded it.

A visualiser for civil radar data. Data in, little planes in the screen out. And other nice stuff. I designed a simple C++ API that allowed the client to write business code faster than we would have ourselves (if only because of communication overhead), saving weeks of work. That contribution was utterly ignored for personal reasons, and I was eventually out. I have no idea what my actual impact was, because I don't know how far the project even went, and how widely it was eventually deployed.

The maintenance of ground software for small civil observation drones. I did some cool stuff, but then was asked to transfer ownership of this software to a recently bought team (that did stuff similar to the company I worked for). I could have known how many drones were actually deployed, but to be honest my thing just saved a few minutes of flight, while most of the cost is to get the drone and its operator on site. That company was never really profitable, I hope the good people I met there are doing well.

Scripting language for a programmable logic controller test environment. For the military, so I don't think I was allowed to even know the size of the team we'd deliver the software to. I got good feedback from them (they were happy about what I did), and I'm pretty sure my static typing made things easier for them than if I had just picked Lua or something, but how easier, and how much money it will save in the long run I have no freaking clue.

Stuff in a missile company I cannot disclose. I believe my impact was almost nil, I couldn't stand their abysmal tech environment.

Maintenance of a ground troops training system (a glorified laser tag, with debrief helpers and so on). Good luck assessing the impact of a better system, and I was just asked to do small tasks I could barely chose anyway.

Prototype ADAS system. It was never deployed. Actual impact was therefore basically nil. Cool stuff to work on though, the CAN bus is a think of beauty. One of the rare instances where I could actually learn from example, instead of seeing yet again one of the gazillion obvious ways how not to do stuff.

Ground software for some IoT device. Impact fundamentally uncertain, we had yet to sell it to anyone.

Incident reporting software, based upon a more generic distributed base. I made the encryption layer (between users & company server), with a security based on PAKE (thus avoiding a PKI, which simplified the work of the sysadmin, at a slight loss of security). Impact fundamentally uncertain, we had yet to sell it to anyone.

Charging stations for electric vehicles. I did the TPM provisioning, and mentioned a low-key security issue along the way. I participated in a questionable micro-service that was meant to help user interfaces (yeah, their IoT stuff had a micro-service architecture). Impact: whatever I did didn't save them: one year after I left, they're now going under.

Preliminary study on the possible use of AMD-SEV to prevent users from peeking at our secret sauce (DRM). I don't think I was allowed to know the list of clients, and it's not even the only alternative. I don't think I could ever have assessed the long term impact of my work there.

Flight recorder for trains (not a flight recorder then, but you get the idea). I just did little tasks here and there, didn't get the chance to have a good bird's eye view of the thing or its environment. Deployment base was knowable, but the business impact of my work was likely minimal, beyond "finish this step so we can show the client we're on track for the next short term milestone". The whole thing is a heap of technical debt, common components are impossible to update (user projects aren't locked to a given revision, they all pull from trunk), the build system is a home made monstrosity that doesn't help more than the standard monstrosities (I hate build systems)… and I was just axed from a round of layoffs.

Cryptographic library I did on my free time: https://monocypher.org/ Nice little thing with a significant user base in the embedded ecosystem (not even my primary target). I controlled everything from start to finish, and I have no idea how many users I have, let alone how much time and money I saved them. In part because it is so simple, with such an outstanding documentation (which I mostly didn't write), that most users don't even have to bug me.

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To sum this up, my resume looks fairly horrible with respect to what I know of my actual business impact. Most of it, I think, was entirely outside my control. And I don't think I'm exceptional in this.

If I could offer one piece of unsolicited advice: in whatever you do next, make it a point to understand a) how the business is doing and b) what your impact to the business will be.

Make it a point to gather numbers like e.g. revenue figures, growth rates, costs, usage metrics. It is true that us underlings aren't usually handed these numbers, but you might be surprised by how easy it is to get them once you start looking. And once you have those numbers, you can derive some good estimates around your own impact towards the business.

Having those numbers will help you understand your own impact. They will also help you avoid companies that, for a lack of a better word, are destined to fail.

(I'm a fan of your blog btw. I really liked the article on the Monty Hall problems!)

(Thanks for the compliment!)

I should be able to try this the next few weeks (new gig). But again, I'll be working on a prototype where such projections have already been made, the plan have already been laid out, and I'll mostly have to follow orders with relatively little wiggle room (they also expect me to hit the ground running). My only expected impact there is whether the stuff gets done on time or not. And assuming it is, the main company will throw the prototype away and rewrite everything anyway (at least they're supposed to).

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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!