It is important that you keep a track record of the impact you make in your career, and that includes accomplishments outside your 9 - 5 job. Why? The record

  1. is a bank of your impact for your next salary re-negotiation, promotion or job search
  2. serves as a reference for you to measure your career growth
  3. helps you evaluate how much value you have contributed or created
  4. inspires you to do more

Developer Efficiency

All the work that we do (as software engineers) falls into two main 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
  • clearing technical debt
  • mentoring junior developers, thereby increasing team efficiency
  • building features and resolving bugs in record time

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. Your softwares use only a a parts of the tool. As a software engineer, you were able to build another tool that replaced the tool for $50/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 the previous cost ($100/month) with the current cost ($50/month). In terms of percentages, you can say that you built a custom tool that reduced cost by 50%. In monetary terms, you can say that you built a custom tool that helped reduce cost from $1200/year to about $600/year.

If a project 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%.

Your impact is that you saved about 30% of the project’s budgeted 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 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

Most times, as an engineer, you are not the originator of the ideas for product features. One of the things you can do under this category is to implement features in an efficient manner 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 used by people from different countries with different currencies. The software shows the price of items in only one currency. You noticed that this was poor user experience. Users had to calculate the price conversion themselves 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 implemented it.

Using the report from analytics, you found that users did not leave to another website to convert the price. You also noticed an 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

You would try to communicate your impact to yourself and also others eventually. The magnitude of your impact is easily relatable when it is quantified. Quantifying impact also helps your audience (which includes you) understand the extent of the impact. Saying it is 2km away from here is clearer than it is far away from here.

Cheers.