> I do care about metrics. I especially appreciate metrics that are presented with two components:
> How they can be tied to business objectives.
> Your contribution in achieving that metric.
I think this one is often tough for junior ICs and even senior ICs in big companies. It's still tough for me after decades. A lot of us are far down on the totem pole, 8 managers away from anyone who knows anything about business objectives. If your job is to turn protobufs from one API into json on the other API, it's going to be difficult to turn this into a description of adding business value.
Projects in tech companies are gigantic. "Impact" is always super hard to quantify. Down at the bottom of the totem pole, you're working on a tiny 0.01% piece of the product. That's my impact?! Not very impressive. Higher up on in management, or off to the side in product management / project management, you're not really physically doing any of the actual product, but are making architectural decisions, serving as tech lead, herding cats, submitting status reports and so on. How do you quantify that? Some people just punt and focus on the product's performance: say [PRODUCT] earned the company [$X] and won [Y] awards. But you're still not quantifying your own impact. I think for the last 10 years of my career at BigTech, I can't possibly quantify my impact in numeric terms because they were such small pieces of gargantuan projects.
I think this one is often tough for junior ICs and even senior ICs in big companies. It's still tough for me after decades. A lot of us are far down on the totem pole, 8 managers away from anyone who knows anything about business objectives. If your job is to turn protobufs from one API into json on the other API, it's going to be difficult to turn this into a description of adding business value.
Projects in tech companies are gigantic. "Impact" is always super hard to quantify. Down at the bottom of the totem pole, you're working on a tiny 0.01% piece of the product. That's my impact?! Not very impressive. Higher up on in management, or off to the side in product management / project management, you're not really physically doing any of the actual product, but are making architectural decisions, serving as tech lead, herding cats, submitting status reports and so on. How do you quantify that? Some people just punt and focus on the product's performance: say [PRODUCT] earned the company [$X] and won [Y] awards. But you're still not quantifying your own impact. I think for the last 10 years of my career at BigTech, I can't possibly quantify my impact in numeric terms because they were such small pieces of gargantuan projects.