~found this answer on quora~

Imagine you are a product, and you want to sell yourself to your manager for the highest possible salary. You’d want to

Know your customers

Know what you’re selling

What are you selling?


John solves LeetCode questions in 10 minutes, and codes fluently in C++, Python, and HTML. He joined Google as a new grad, and was immediately assigned to refactor legacy code.

He wondered why he was getting boring work after his straight-A performance in school, and toyed with the idea of going back to school for a PhD.

To John’s manager, John was a coder. That refactoring project needed a coder, and John fit the bill.


Manager Mike had a few more projects that needed doing.

He needed to replace the decision engine with a machine learning model. Obviously he needed a machine learning expert for that.

He needed to fix the emerging crisis that his VP was pinging him about. For this, he needed his fastest, most reliable engineer.

And he needed a tech lead. For that, he needed someone with excellent technical judgment, great stakeholder relationships, and an eye towards growing junior colleagues.

John didn’t get these tasks because he sold himself as a coder. And because John was a coder, Mike gave him the tasks that required no other skills.

Top 1% engineers know what value they bring to the table, and sell it to customers in sore need of that skillset.

Who are your customers?

Dan joined the team, and was none of these. But he was less interested in who he was, and more interested in Mike.

Mike was constantly stressed. He worked nights and weekends, and he was most stressed at the end of each quarter, when he had to report on how close the team was to its metric goals.

Dan was also given refactoring work, which he completed quickly. But he knew that Mike really needed to hit those goals every quarter.

He came up with an idea, and ran a bunch of SQL queries to show it would bump the team above its quarterly goals. Mike was intrigued, and asked his team to work on it.

The wins were delivered as promised, and Mike breathed a sigh of relief.

Dan’s wallet got so heavy he needed a new pair of pants.

The best engineers feel when people around them are struggling, and use their skills to sell them a solution. Dan could have sold himself as a SQL expert. Instead, he was the guy Mike could rely on to make sure the metrics went up.

Engineering, like every other job, is a customer service role.