A lot of the frustration I typically hear in this camp is something like “well I shipped a huge refactor that cleaned up all the code, why does no one appreciate that?” One particular interaction that got me thinking was a few years ago listening to an acquaintance telling me how he spent months meticulously cleaning up the data pipeline and making it perfect, and how no one appreciated this work.

Like, as an engineer, I don’t doubt that this work is valuable. But you have to imagine what it must sound like from the perspective of a PM or EM. Itd be like my PM saying “I spent the last month organizing all eng docs to be properly formatted with bullet points.” You’d be like, uhh, okay, but how does that affect the rest of the company? More importantly, how does the PM distinguish engineers who are doing impactful work from the engineers who are doing the “bullet point formatting” work, of which surely some exist? From the perspective of a PM, these types of work can be hard to tell apart.

Really what you want to do is articulate what you plan to do, ahead of time, in a way that actually clicks for non-technical people. For instance, I was pushing unit tests and integration tests at my company for years but never found the political will to make them a priority. I tried and tried, but my manager just wouldn’t see it. Eventually, there was a really bad SEV, and I told her that tests would prevent this sort of thing from happening again. At that point the value became obvious. Now we have tests, and more importantly, everyone understands how valuable they are.