ALT Many engineers should be doing less work. I don’t necessarily mean producing less code or fewer changes, but literally working fewer hours in the day. When they do work, they should be working at a slower pace. I like to aim to be running at 80% utilization by default: unless I have a high-pressure project going on, I spend 20% of my workday away from the computer. High-impact opportunities Why? Performance at tech companies is dominated by outlier events. When I think about the most impactful changes I’ve made, many of them involved a surprisingly trivial amount of work. There are no points for effort in software development. What matters is solving the right problem at the right time.

ALT In large engineering organizations, there are usually trivial pieces of engineering work you could do that would make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for the company. Here are three common examples: First, when the company is trying to sign a big enterprise deal, stepping in with a feature or bugfix can make the deal happen. It doesn’t even have to be a good feature: sometimes just showing that you’re willing and able to make a concrete change will be enough. Second, preventing or mitigating an incident early (even by just knowing the right feature flag to turn off) can save huge amounts of money: both immediate lost revenue during the incident and future lost revenue from customers who would have pulled their business or refused to sign pending contracts.