What is "impact"?

As a mid level SWE, these are questions you should be asking your manager and/or mentor. What "impact" actually is will depend greatly on the tasks/product/project.

Impact is simply how your work changed the company (hopefully for the better). For example, when I worked on improving matchmaking and game session creation I would describe what I did and then say something like: decreased a player's time into match by ~10-20%. When I've worked on internal tools I might write something like: did X which improved Y saving Z minutes/hours/days of dev time over the course of a day/month/year.

There may as well be a perception component to if what you work on is "impactful"

Not all work will necessarily produce $1M dollars in annual revenue. As long as what you are doing is something others care about and recognize, thats impact.

For example, if you built a script or internal site to make some annoying manual process one click of a button, thats impact if you can highlight hours saved across N developers, Z teams. Time is money!!!

The key is there is some onus on you to market why your work matters. Manager is not an all knowing oracle that just knows. They have million other threads to manage. Go out there, sell yourself and TELL A STORY!!

Typically, you want to start thinking about quantitative vs qualitative impact. Quantitative might be stuff like "decreased compute costs by X (dollars, hrs/mo, whatever)". Qualitative is stuff like "improved IDE experience by fixing autocomplete in X,Y,Z scenarios", or something along those lines.

You typically want to write down quantitative metrics in your impact resume when you're talking about impact.

One way to start is learning about the observability systems in your company by going into on-call alerts/dashboard, learning from your seniors how those are done and then start using those APIs to track metrics for things that you want to measure that are related to your work. This gives you the "before" and "after" numbers that you can reference to quantify your "impact". Then it's up to you to translate those numbers into some business-relevant sentence in such a way that your skip manager or a director can grok (i.e. something that sounds obviously "good for the business" when stated in plain english).

"Visible" usually means that the work is very relevant to one of the key results that your org's VP is focusing on any given semester, e.g. a project that they mention by name. For L4, the scope of impact may be only part of a larger cross-org initiative, but ideally it should sound "obviously good" for at least one management level above your direct manager, within the context of that larger initiative.

Affecting multiple teams, or directly contributing to profit.

The unfortunate reality is - the vast majority of teams are not high impact. There is a huge amount of internal tooling at any large corporation which is hard to measure the impact of but it's like obscenity. The developers will know it's high impact because they use it daily. This is something I've been talking to directors about - is that there are many jobs we do that are "dirty jobs". They are critical to the business, boring and not visible, but someone's gotta do it. Good directors and VPs will see that too and give you slack for not being on a directly measurable team.

You have many projects within META.

Visible projects are those projects that generate cash flow. Or simply, MONEY projects. Projects management is extra observant of.

High-impact projects are those that define how the company operates. They can be money projects or critical tools that are used constantly in the day-to-day (Golang at google is not a money project but it sure is high-impact).

Now, the buzzwording is already killing me, but your work being high-impact and visible is not completely same as above.

High-impact work - you are doing important work on a project - not moving buttons around on the home page

Visible work - your work improves the things that management is keeping tabs on, like your work improved Netflix load time by 0.8 seconds.

SO, get on a project that management cares about and make it better.

A lot of these are partially right, but the actual basis is "impact" is having people agree your work is impactful. Some things are definitely easier to get agreement, such as "increased profit", or "more engagement", but what really matters is that people agree it matters.

Generally this will come from your manager, and a tech lead somewhere, but I'd suggest this - there are E6s who aren't doing a whole lot of quantitative impact. The important thing is what they do matters to someone

Impact can mean many things. However I quantify impact as how many people your choices impact and how much followership you have. Is your name known for the work you do?

Also, as you move up the ranks the nature of your work changes:

Junior - Defined work, defined solution, small projects

Mid - defined work, defined solution, medium project

Senior - defined work, ambiguous solution, large project

Principal - ambiguous work, ambiguous solutions, very high impact expected

The further up you go, the more leadership you need. You should know what needs to be done.

Look at what you do as "deliverables" and consider the goal of those deliverables. Do they do the thing good or really good or bad?

Feature monthly active users, revenue, user attrition, error rates, downtime, latency, CPU usage, QA tickets filed, there's a gazillion different possible signals.

For better or for worse, there are generally several someones that have limited understanding of your craft and are looking for measurable things to judge your work against - identify things you can use to measure the success of your work and be sure to track them!

"High impact" in that framing is "are your numbers good numbers". That's being pretty reductionist but it's a good rough framing in my opinion.

That is decided by the people several levels above you. The problem is your team could be in maintenance mode and you'll have no exposure to the truly impactful initiatives. Talk to your manager and then your skip. You can get a good idea of where your team lies on the spectrum.

"Impact" is the ability to convince other people that your work is important, or getting them to assign you work they think is important.

If you do all the work you're assigned, do it well, but nobody thinks it's important, then you get a failing grade for "impact".

Impact is subjective and specific to the metric or metrics being tracked. I would also argue that it’s specific to the business/organization goals and objectives.

First of all, in this context, "impact" is just another corporate buzzword. But what it roughly translates to is "explain how what you did was actually useful and not a waste of your employer's time and money" - i.e. they want you to convince them, that if they hire and pay you, they'll get some results from you.

When you deleted the whole production database. /s

Junior and mid tier don't have much say in terms of impact of their project, they have more ability to show impact of their work on the project (when you're given a task, are you able to deliver it - the amount of independence scales as the level goes up). Moving toward senior, you have more say in terms of the project delivery and more choices in what the junior people work on - as well as showing that you're helping the junior people grow their independence (assigning them tasks that build their skills and give them a chance to demonstrate that). The higher you go, the more choice you have on what to work on so there's "I picked things that made the most money" or "I picked things that saved the most resources" and set appropriate priorities for teams of size X with increasing X.

Impact is a noticeable change in (some) direction.

Way back when around 2007 I was working on a large CCTV solution with hundreds of cameras. And at one point we made a variation of the solution. Limited system with max 16 cameras for private users. So simple a child could use it.

I remember that for years I tried to make a product out of it. And it was always ignored. All we had to do is pack 4 cheap Web cameras in the box and ship it. Home Video Surveillance. This is all made worse by the fact that my company's primary business at the time was (building) automation.
4 years later someone made Nest system and is now a billionaire.

How's that for an impact? ~~~~

$$$$$

Another way I've heard it talked about is solving the problems that people care about. For instance, my role was mainly around bringing new clients on board and creating their ETL platforms. However I had met with our engagement team, whom expressed difficulty in preparing the marketing materials as they were not a technical resource. This meant there was a major gap in automation, reusability, structure, and defined expectations in the process. While I'm not about to take on their role for them, I was able to quickly identify through their complaints, simple tools or scripts I could create for them that would make their job easier. Things that they would come to work every day and dread, I could solve in a day, forever, by automating. These tend to get you glowing praise in a cross-functional way, so not only your boss sees the good job, but in a way your boss gets a pat on the back for their job managing you. Hope the example helps.

At my company impact is stretching the truth in what your efforts to the point where it breaks, and taking one step backwards.

When you deploy a feature that is important, it will likely be A-B tested, and the impact on various metrics will be measured.

Impact with internal teams would be things like how many teams use your system, how many times your API is called per month, etc.

You were close on the profit idea. You can reference DORA metrics as an example and apply it to your work. So impact could mean:

• time reduced to complete a task (time = money) by simplifying or automating a process humans would need to do

• improved reliability by fixing a known bug / scaling issue etc (downtime = money lost)

• saved cost by reducing infrastructure needs eg. Made a function / app more efficient so rather than needing a bigger resource to run it it can be smaller or time needed for it to run is reduced

You don't need to hit a home run on everything. If you can address one of the above with your work and explain it you are in a good spot.

The key in high paying tech companies is to know what your OKR/KPI's are. Sometimes $$$ doesn't matter and only user growth or use does, sometimes $$$ is the key factor. You have to stay aware of the company goals at the time as they change. Don't try and do what you think is best for the company, follow the company goals.

The best advice I can give you is ALWAYS know how to end to end test your code like your users use it. If you're writing a micro service, learn the macro vision of the services that work together. That way if your company is in a cost cutting mode, you know where you can help trim down CPU or infrastructure use. If you're in a growth mode, you know what user events to really focus in on and build out the funnel to see how you can keep your users engaged.

Also word of advice-- being a team player matters more than tech skills in nearly all CS jobs. Lead from within, you'll accomplish way more by setting a positive vibe. Most problems being solved at this level are too large to be solved by a single developer, so any time you feel like you're doing everything take a step back and remember that's a sign you're not doing your best work.

"Impact" is how brown your nose is and how politically connected you are to the ones that control the purse strings.

You said it's right, increased profit and more users. Profit can be making the app run faster which reduces time spent using it, costing less which increases profit. More users use your app, more impact. Really not a Ph.D question.

Impact is big numbers.

Work on a project with a billion plus users? That's a lot of impact. Work on a pet project with 5 users? You'll be hard pressed to convince anyone that what you're doing is impactful. Work on a project that increases revenue by $1B? Lots of impact. Work on a project that saves the company $10,000 a year? Not a lot of impact.

How would you attribute them to yourself?

Ahh, the part of performance evaluation that I hate doing. You have to spend time measuring your impact. This involves adding metrics, telemetry, and analyzing results to prove your work was impactful.

It’s how your work touches and influences behaviors. That could be internal or external. one thing i would tell anyone is network and know who has access to the databases that track metrics and do readouts to leadership MAKE THEM YOUR FRIEND. you will be able to see how much your work is being utilized and influencing others within your org and or externally.