Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself

I prefer pitching to customers because they really do get more value out of your product if you better communicate what it does and how it helps them. With committees it sounds more like playing a zero-sum game.

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“unless you have a pretty damn concrete idea of what you're doing.”

This. But to take it further, you better be ready to hustle your ass off. Because you need to bring money in which means meeting new clients 24/7/365.

Good luck. It’s an impossible amount of work to do alone so hopefully you have a good network.

The first thing that comes to mind is peer reviews. Although it's not inherently quantitative data and doesn't remove any of the bias/politics/etc. it can be a good indicator of who others feel are helping them.

However as the writer of the article pointed out often times you can't see when other people are improving your ability to do work whether that's through writing more documentation, improving some internal infrastructure, or other often invisible things that can drastically improve your life as an engineer.

I think an effective approach would be through time tracking (i.e: writeup on how you spent your time for the day) in conjunction with some analysis on how the time you spend on certain things correlates with what other engineers are doing. This of course would rely on everyone being detailed in their writeups and the analysis still might not catch certain things because it's difficult to write down exactly how you spent your time. Perhaps you could only write down the three most difficult/annoying problems you ran into and just track that.

I remember reading about some company that is trying to make this easier by tracking computer use and creating graphs of how people interact within their organization and how that changes over time but that doesn't seem like it would work everywhere.

I don't know if there is a way to truly quantify teamwork or organizational impact. I think the important thing is to encourage your organization to communicate more: talk about what you're doing, why you're doing it, and how it helps others within your organization. If your organization is fairly big write about it and share your writeup internally. Train people within your organization to speak up if they feel they aren't being appreciated for the impact they made.

Ultimately I think it's an extremely hard problem because it stems from the question of what having a positive impact means. The answer to that can branch off into millions of different small tasks that could be totally unique to a subset of people within your org.

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The best you can do is:

* Measure what you can.

* Know that's not the entire picture and it never will be.

After that try to create a culture that:

1. Speaks up about their own impact

2. Shares the impact of others' work, especially of those who might not speak out much

3. Is openly appreciative of and encourages 1 and 2.

This is exactly how many many many people feel, with one difference - most people don't even get the chance to pick up good skills, tech or otherwise. They are stuck doing the same thing for months and years. Add to it visa, family complications and the situation gets worse.

At least he learned a lot, has Google on his resume, I'm genuinely happy for him.

I hope he really makes it! More indie hackers the better.