Where Your Salary Comes From: Three Budgets for Developers

The post was originally written for the Telegram channel.

When you start looking for work in foreign companies, very often you are asked what value you brought to previous employers. And quite often it is difficult to answer this question with specific numbers.

Do you know how much money the form you designed last month made? How much did registrations increase or decrease when you changed the color of the "Register" button?

In my experience, the developer most often does not know the answer to these questions, because from his point of view it does not matter. He receives a salary for working and has no direct relationship or influence on the company's income.

While I was on vacation, I decided to sort out my mail and came across an article from Swizec Teller with reflections on the topic of where the budget for paying salaries to developers comes from.

The author recorded three budgets: sales/marketing, R&D and maintenance.

Since there are quite a few integrators and developers among subscribers, I will omit the discussion of the first budget for now.

But we can say that you are lucky if you receive a salary from the R&D budget, because this means that for the company you are an investment. Every day you solve product development issues, come up with the next "breakthrough" feature, or study a new technology that will help reduce product loading time.

The results of your work may be visible in a couple of months, if not a longer period of time. By the way, this is why employers do not like to look at the resumes of "jumpers" who change jobs every six months or a year, if not more often. The developer might not even see the result of his work and how it influenced the product, but is already looking for a new job.

Unfortunately or fortunately, your work is difficult to measure. Plus, what you're doing now may never be published to clients. But you make a product (or even products) for a company, and this brings money to the company, from which your salary is paid.

Things are completely different if you receive a salary from the maintenance budget.

Bug fixing of projects where the code contains jQuery or Backbone, support for an Objective-C application so that it can work with the updated API without changing the code base, editing HTML files directly via FTP, because the sources were lost or not transferred by the developers.

All this is maintenance and if you do any of the above or something similar, then most likely the company sometimes doesn't even understand that you spend so much time digging around every sprint, since the code was written a long time ago.

Stability of systems is what the company needs, because then you can save on maintenance and spend more money on R&D, but the code becomes outdated, browsers and phones are updated, servers are no longer supported, etc.

Maintenance work is easier to evaluate, you can even enter into an SLA (service level agreement) and measure how efficiently and efficiently the maintenance work is performed and decide how much to pay employees.

This is an important job, but it will never be a priority job for the company since it does not directly make money.

Where you get paid from affects your daily tasks, prospects for growth in the company and development opportunities, so always capture your results and measure them, it will come in handy later.