[ary]

> … it means delivering the kind of things that are legible to the decision-makers at the company: i.e. visible to your manager, plus 1-3 skip levels, depending on your title. The easiest way to do this is to deliver things that they already know about, such as projects that they’ve asked you to do, or incidents that are serious enough that they’re involved in them. It’s possible to make other work legible to them as well. If your work produces or saves money, that will make it immediately legible, for instance (or you could just be really convincing). By default, work you do isn’t legible: to the decision-makers, it’s generic technical nonsense. They don’t know whether it’s crucial high-impact work or pointless code reshuffling, and will tend to assume the latter.

This person understands the “business” side of the tech business. I couldn’t agree more. Where many struggle is that they can’t communicate legibly about the indirect benefits their work has for the business. The classic “refactoring” (which he mentions) is a great example.

Refactoring code has a context dependent benefit to a business. When you’re searching for product/market fit is has essentially no benefit, and then you’re Microsoft and the code is deep within Windows and affects the performance of every Win32 app it can have extreme benefits. In the end it’s all about how you relate your work to either making or saving the organization money, and doing so indirectly can be legible if you take the time to figure out how to best communicate it to the target audience (and how it can be conveyed to customers).

[bluefirebrand]

I couldn't agree more. It really is important for developers careers to learn at least a bit of business speak, and try to learn how to frame problems in ways that business people understand and care about

At the end of the day, most decisions at a business come down to a cost versus benefit, assuming that the business is behaving more or less rationally

Most business people in my experience also view the software itself as an expense, not an asset. I find that software devs do not understand that. "What do you mean the software is a cost center. This whole business sells software, how can we make money without software?"

This isn't how many business types view it. The software doesn't matter to them at all. They would love if they could just sell nothing, so their costs would be zero and their profit margin would be infinite. That is the actual dream

It's not rational but you gotta understand that sales doesn't sell on rational, they sell on vibes, good relationships, bribes, whatever they can get away with.

Trying to be rational when selling puts you on too level of a playing field with other sellers, so they pursue other angles