[jlund-molfese]

I agree! You have to also remember that, if you're the person pushing for something to be priority, it's your job to make it make sense to whoever is responsible for prioritization.

The easiest way to do that is to speak the same language everyone else is. Your product manager probably speaks in dollars (or euros, renminbi, etc). If you provide a good-faith estimate (ballpark ranges are totally fine) that increased test coverage or whatever your technical objective is will cost 200 dev hours, and save 400 dev hours on an annual basis, or reduce the rate of support tickets by 15%, or allow for X future business scenario to be supported or whatever, you'll generally have way better luck. My favorite "trick" is taking tech debt work, and framing it in a way so, not only do I not have to push for it as "tech work", but my PM will actually put it on the roadmap proactively because it just makes sense from a business perspective.

It also gets easier over time. You might get some skepticism at first, but if you have a history of delivering accurate estimates and results over months or years, you'll build trust with stakeholders such that what might've taken a round of meetings to convince them before, can now be a 10-minute conversation.

[creer]

Sure except that "saving money" is not what makes a company win, and so it's rightly not what makes a career. If you can show that building that new library for $X will streamline engineering by Y% which will allow doubling sales by launching 3 new products - NOW you have a good proposition. (Your "X future business scenario").

Saving money on the current product is only useful if the company has no clue where to go next. Since normally the current product will be gone in 2 years. It can be useful when your company is in long steady production, like a refinery where saving 0.5% would be huge.

This is something people often miss about dodgy code bases. Or about writing a large application in a weird choice for a language. IF you were able to deliver that application AND it's still profitable 5 years later, THEN already it was hugely successful. You can argue that it was not in the correct language and you are wrong because it was ALREADY hugely successful. Same for cleaning up the documentation.

[jlund-molfese]

I don't disagree, but I'm not sure if you meant to reply to my comment? I didn't make any references to saving money; the point I'm making is that spending 10 hours this week in order to have 10 additional hours of capacity (ability to build out new features tied to revenue) every month is often a bargain that makes sense.

In the context of full-time engineers, "saving time" actually means that time will be reinvested into product feature development, rather than resulting in less spending on engineering pay. Similarly, engineers spending less time on support, means they can spend more time on feature development.

[creer]

Your comment mentioned

> cost 200 dev hours, and save 400 dev hours

And I argue that this is rarely the right perspective. It's 200 hours NOW - and that the company doesn't have budget for. In order to save 400 hours maybe perhaps, if the stars align, two years from now. It's not the same budget. It's not the same time frame. It's not your dept's responsibility. In theory yes maybe but in most businesses, no. These 200 hours now are an investment. This 400 hours maybe perhaps are savings, not profit. They may allow an equivalent 400 hours spent on some profitable new product - but then just ask for budget for the profitable new product, don't worry about where that money comes from. That's sooo far above your pay grade, it's not even funny. If the idea for where to spend the 400 hours is worthwhile, the chairman will raise money to do it. Bring THAT idea to management. THAT would be well received.

In summary: the savings and the new product don't come from the same bits of the balance sheets. They don't affect the future company the same. The wasted 400 hours are already considered in the estimates for the next few years, they are essentially already amortized. They already don't matter. It's not fun for an individual engineer to consider that their work for the next 3 years is financially already long forgotten, lol (?), but basically yes.

It MAY be the right perspective for several levels of management higher up, if people are REALLY working on a 40 year perspective for, I don't know, a mainstream database package, a compiler. But nobody does (in first approximation).

It's also is a good viewpoint where crazy thin differences do make an impact (a refinery).

Still: Most companies that don't plan to be gone in two years do have a methods department or working group. People who do try and make the processes better. They have budget to do that. Bring the idea to them. Hell, even start working part or full time on their budget. But with the understanding that this is yet another group, mission, budget. It's not 200 hours here in exchange for 400 there. And this is a highly technical group - not CXO track except perhaps for a brief stint there.