Something to readCompensation
Don't call yourself a programmer, and other career advice
A blunt essay for new engineers on how companies value work, and how to describe yours
Why it’s worth your time
How a company values your work often comes down to whether it can see you making money or saving it. Patrick McKenzie wrote this in 2011 for engineers fresh out of school, and it's blunt, funny and a little cynical about pay, networks and modesty. The frame it hands you can work well beyond software.
Describe your work in business terms
The essay · 25 min · Free
How to get it
Opens their site. We don’t copy it here; we’d rather they get the read.
- Read the essay.
Look for the profit center and cost center idea near the start, then the sections on negotiation and on modesty, where it turns to how you talk about yourself.
- Rewrite one piece of your work in business terms.
Pick something you did in the last few months. Write one sentence on what it changed for the business: money it brought in, cost or time it saved, or a risk it reduced, with a number if you can find one. Use that sentence the next time someone asks what you've been working on.
Good moments for this: before you update your resumeahead of a salary conversationin your first year out of school
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
McKenzie warns against mistaking coworkers, bosses and friendly interviewers for friends, and he frames interviews as transactions. You can take his point about how decisions get made without treating colleagues as counterparties, and describing your work by what it does for your team tends to help them as much as you.
What might make this harder
Estimate, and say it's an estimate: hours a week saved, how many people use it, how often the old way went wrong. Asking whoever owns the budget or the metric how they'd measure it can get you the number and a useful conversation.
Questions people ask
What is Don't Call Yourself a Programmer about?
It's a 2011 essay by Patrick McKenzie, written as career advice for new software engineers. It argues that companies hire people to raise revenue or cut costs, so you'll tend to be valued and paid more if you describe your work in those terms, and it covers networking, negotiation and modesty along the way.
What is a profit center versus a cost center?
A profit center is the part of a business that brings money in, like sales; a cost center is the rest, like IT or HR, which keeps things running without directly earning. McKenzie, who credits the terms to Peter Drucker, argues that roles attached to profit centers get better pay and more respect.
How do I describe my work in business terms?
Name what changed because of it: revenue brought in, costs or hours saved, or a risk reduced, with a rough number where you have one. Leave out the technical detail unless the listener needs it.
Is Don't Call Yourself a Programmer still relevant?
The central idea holds up well, while some details, like the hiring market and the salary-history advice, date from 2011.
What it says, and how it holds up
A company doesn't hire someone because it loves the craft. It hires because a project needs doing, and the project is expected to bring money in or keep money from going out. That's the backbone of Patrick McKenzie's essay, written in 2011 as the course he wished every engineering degree included. If the people deciding your pay can't see what your work does for the business, they're more likely to price it as a cost. From there he argues for attaching yourself to the parts of a company that earn, and for describing yourself by what you've added rather than by your tools.
The rest is a tour of what he learned the hard way, in short, opinionated sections. Most jobs, he writes, are never posted publicly and get filled through people, especially the ones worth having. Negotiation deserves study, and salary is best discussed after they've decided they want you. Modesty, in his view, costs you in American business, so say plainly that you led the part you led. He's funny about all of it and openly market-minded, including about coworkers, which can read as bracing or bleak.
It's fifteen years old, and some of it shows. He wrote during a hot market for engineers, and his warning about the question of your previous salary has been partly overtaken, since a number of US states and cities now limit employers from asking. The equity section makes a serious point through a dice-roll joke: in his table, most rolls leave the grant worth nothing, and he argues that engineers joining a startup badly overestimate both its odds of success and their own share if it does succeed. The idea underneath, that value is judged by the people paying for it and in their terms, has aged better than the specifics.
Some valuable work is slow to show up in revenue or cost: mentoring, documentation, keeping a team from burning out. Forcing that into a dollar figure can sound strained, and it can undersell the work. There, describing it as risk avoided, or as what it makes possible for the people whose work does earn, tends to be more honest than a stretched revenue claim. This explains how things usually work; it isn't financial, tax or legal advice for your situation.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.