Fellow Engineers: This is where your money comes from
<i>&gt; This is why I struggle with scenarios where people discuss pay and work without considering value.</i><p>Counter-point: firms exist.<p>If I&#x27;m the one figuring out how to create value, why the hell are the C suite, middle managers, and investors getting 99% of the profits?<p>So no, in the context of a large firm, it&#x27;s definitely <i>NOT</i> an engineer&#x27;s job to figure out how their skills align with market demand. And that&#x27;s the <i>whole damn point</i> of a firm.<p>Now, this may be reasonable advice if I want to maximize by income. But maybe my goal is to maximize income <i>under the constraint</i> that &quot;my excellent engineering&quot; is the primary consideration in my performance evaluations. And there&#x27;s nothing wrong with that; people trade income for all sorts of things. Telling someone not to make that trade-off is like chiding them for buying an expensive latte or sending their kids to an expensive private school. It&#x27;s not your money, so it&#x27;s none of your business.<p>edit: And, furthermore, the success of large firms and the high compensation available at those firms suggest that the author&#x27;s advice might actually be actively harmful. As an engineer, you might actually be better off ignoring engineering-value alignment because you might be better off simply executing well within a well-oiled machine.