It is important that you keep a track record of the impact you make in your career (including accomplishments outside your daily job). Why? The record

  1. serves as a reference for you to measure your career growth
  2. helps you to evaluate yourself to know how much value you have contributed through the work that you have done (at work, in open source, wherever else)
  3. keeps a record of your impact for your next salary raise or promotion negotiation, or job search
  4. motivates you to do more because when you know that you keep a track record of your impact, you will want to do more to add to it

Developer Efficiency

All the work that we do (as software engineers) boils down to two main impact categories

  1. help save more money
  2. help make more money

In practical terms, they include

  • reducing time spent doing work
  • automating manual processes
  • building custom tools that cost cheaper to manage software (this includes clearing technical debt)
  • mentoring junior developers, thereby increasing team efficiency per unit time
  • implementing features and resolving bugs in record time help, among other things.

In keeping a track record of your impact, it is important that you record the extent of the impact. Like an earthquake, you need to note the magnitude of the impact.

Quantifying Your Accomplishments

1. Saving Money

Let’s assume that your employer pays about $100/month for a tool that your software uses for logging, but your software uses only one part of the whole tool. As a software engineer, you were able to build a custom tool that did the same thing for $5/month. The effect (or impact) of what you have done here is that you have helped your company spend less/save money.

In quantifying this impact, you can compare what was previously spent to what is currently and state the difference. In terms of percentages, you can say that you built a custom tool for logging that reduced cost by 95%. In monetary terms, you can say that you built a custom tool for logging that helped reduce cost from $1200/year to about $60/year.

If project X was estimated to take 6 months and you were able to lead a team that completed it in 4 months, or you contributed immensely to the project being completed in 4 months, you have made impact. How can this impact be quantified? In percentages, 2/6 * 100 is about 30%.

You can say that you were able to save about 30% of project X’s projected expense by leading a team that completed it before the estimated completion date. This statement not only shows your impact, it also shows your leadership skills. If you were not the team lead on project X, your impact statement would read like saved about 30% of project X’s projected expense by [making it easier to complete/completing] a large part of the requirements before the estimated completion date. This shows how much impact you made in numbers and also how much of a team player you are.

2. Making Money

A lot of the times, as an engineer, you are not the originator of the ideas that generate revenue for your employer. Those ideas usually come from business intelligence, the product owner or the product manager. One of the things you can do under this category is to implement the idea in an efficient way that helps increase revenue more than the average. You can also contribute to or improve the idea.

For example, you are a frontend engineer working on software that is used by people from different countries, having different currencies. The software shows the price of items in only one currency. You noticed that this was a UX barrier for users because they had to find out how much they had to pay in their currency before making a purchase? You made a suggestion to show two prices - the price in the base currency and the price in the user’s currency. You also went ahead to implement it.

You measured the difference in the software usage from your frontend analytics software and found that users did not have to leave the page to go to another page to convert the price. You also noticed a slight increase of 2% in sales volume as reported by the product manager. There! Thats your impact - reduced user turnover, causing an increase in sales volume by 2% through suggesting and implementing the display of prices in user own currencies.

Conclusion

In keeping record of your accomplishments, have it in mind that at the end of the day, you would try to communicate it to yourself and also others. Communicating your impact is improved when it is quantified. Quantifying it helps your audience (which includes you) to understand how much and to what extent the impact was made. Saying it is 2km away from here clearly communicates better than it is far away from here.

Cheers.