Outcomes, Not Syntax

When budget cuts come, the "Python Developer" gets evaluated on salary cost. The engineer who can point to a conversion improvement, a system that stopped crashing in production, or a migration that cut the infrastructure bill in half gets evaluated on impact. The work is identical. The difference is whether the person doing it has learned to translate it into terms the business can measure.

Patrick McKenzie has made this point directly: to a business, a "Python Developer" or a "React Programmer" is a cost center — an expensive resource with a specific label. The business doesn't care about Python or React. It cares about what those tools enabled.

The engineers who build leverage are the ones who can articulate that connection. "I built backend systems that reduced API latency by 40%, which improved user retention" is a different kind of claim than "I write Java." One describes a tool. The other describes an impact. Revenue, costs, reliability, risk, retention — these are the things the business actually measures, and fluency in those terms is what separates engineers who are seen as execution resources from engineers who are seen as strategic ones.

That translation is a skill, and it develops the same way technical skills do — deliberately, over time. Start by asking what the work you're doing is actually enabling. Then find the business term for it. The engineer who can answer that question fluently rarely has to worry about being the one the budget cut lands on.