Your Function Is Engineering, but Your Career Is Sales

don't turn over your work to "the suits", be proactive in communicating

Engineering is such a beautiful practice. You start by learning physics and the laws of the universe. Then you build upon that fundamental knowledge to understand the layers of abstraction that other humans have already discovered/built. Finally you turn the ideas in your head into things that can be useful to all of humanity. This is a mind-blowing superpower.

I began programming when I was a kid because I wanted to play games and I wasn’t allowed to buy a video game system — even with my own hard-earned paper route money! We had computers at home, which my father told me were much more flexible and powerful than any video game system. He was right.

However, there’s more to success than having great technical abilities. Compared to modern contemporary game systems Nintendo has succeeded despite its inferior technical specs. It’s the characters they create, the worlds they build, the stories they tell. That’s what sells video games. The stories.

Something in the engineer’s mindset trains us to think “as long as I am doing great work eventually everyone will figure it out.” But I’ve learned something they won’t teach you in engineering school. Great engineering must be packaged, marketed, and sold to someone to be useful – this is often thought of as an end customer who buys the product. But it could just as well be someone who allocates budgets across an organization or a portfolio of organizations. Or it could be a team within an org who relies on the output of your work. This is as true for a founder raising venture capital, as it is for a job-seeker looking to get hired by a breakout startup, or a mid-career engineer trying to get promoted to a senior engineer.

It turns out that the packaging, marketing, and sales is where a substantial amount of the overall value of engineering work accrues. If you’re great at building, why not extend your skills to participate in more of the value of whatever it is you're creating? You don’t need to turn into some hot-air-blowing charlatan. You don’t need to be on customer calls all day. But you’ll earn more trust, responsibility, and money in any career if you can sell yourself and your work better.

What are some of the non-obvious times you’re selling?

• When you’re setting your team’s quarterly goals

• When you’re at a daily standup meeting sharing your updates with the engineering team

• When you’re chatting with the founder of a rocket ship startup you might want to join

It helps to learn some basics.

1. Establish trust.

   There are tons of ways to establish trust. The gold standard may be delivering on your commitments over an extended period of time, but the feedback cycle on this will necessarily take a long time. Instead a lot of trust is established via “small talk”. This helps find common ground via mutual connections, shared history, or shared experiences. In a job interview (or while raising money for your startup) you may share your deep-nerd hobby making the perfect chocolate confection, playing League of Legends, or training for your first half-marathon. These appear to be irrelevant details, but they allow you to connect with a person better. Maybe you’ll discover you have mutual friends. This gives you some shared context and maybe inspires something you can mention in a follow-up email. Also, a lot of trust is transitive. If you’re endorsed by people who already have established trust with your “buyer” your sale becomes about 100x easier. Your “buyer” could be an angel/VC, a founder who’s hiring, or a manager who is considering who on the team to promote.

2. Ask questions that get them talking. Then shut up and listen.

   Get your counterparty talking as much as possible. “Tell me more about this new ML engineering role you have in mind. What are you hoping to accomplish?” Once you hear how they talk about their problems, needs, and desires, you can more accurately frame yourself. Are they focused on “faster”, “better”, or “cheaper”? What tradeoffs are they considering for the role? Their language will tell you things like if they’re looking to bring on an individual contributor who may grow into a leadership position. About 90% of the substance of what they care about will not be listed in a job req.

3. Frame using your counterparty’s language.

   Use their words when describing the problem and explaining your solution. Think about what they actually care about in life. If we’re being honest, it’s probably something related to lowering their stress, making more money, or self-actualization. How are you helping them solve that? “I know that hiring an ML engineer to join the founding team is one of your top priorities since you want to ship X in the next 3 months. I worked on the core ML infrastructure at <impressive company Y>. I can build A, B, and C in the next 3 months, which from what I understand is everything we’re going to need to achieve X”. Sounds like you’re going to make this founder’s life lower stress. Sold!

   [As a side note, notice the use of “we/our”. For a prospective core team member it can be pitch perfect in demonstrating the future you’re imagining working side-by-side.]

4. Sacrifice completeness for clarity.

   Completeness may be required while you’re doing engineering work - you’ve gotta make it actually work. But the same attention to detail adds confusion while communicating it. People respond to memorable stories. Skip the chronologically accurate history of everything that happened in your career or a specific project. Anchor on a few of the highlights that demonstrate what you actually want to communicate (i.e. “hire me and your biggest problems will go away”, “invest in me and you’ll make great returns”). Elevate the successes and bury the dead-ends.

5. Paint the future you want to see, but do it in their interests.

   Use details that you know are desirable to your counterparty, but that establish your own plans and aspirations. Instead of saying “I’d like my role to grow into being an engineering manager at the company” say “I’d be expecting to hire from my network and outside to manage our ML team as we grow.” Make sure you get agreement on this, but it’s a good way to set the tone for the relationship.

These are some basic sales techniques you can use to be more persuasive. Use these to up-level how you communicate about your work and you’ll participate in a greater share of the value you create.