Improve Market Value

dennyzhang

URL: https://quantcodedenny.com/posts/improve-market-value/

Working deeply in ML Infra (like Meta or Google) can make your skills feel too specialized. You solve critical problems — but the broader market may not see your full capability. The key is to grow visibility and generalize impact organically, through habits you already do daily.

Core Principles

  • Think End-to-End → Connect your work to business goals, reliability, and system health.
  • Focus on Non-Urgent Impact → Block time weekly to fix recurring pain or document key learnings.
  • Translate to Market Value → Frame results in measurable terms (revenue, cost, scale, reliability).
  • Learn and Share → Write short notes or posts to spread knowledge and show thought leadership.

Regular Routine

Weekly Habits

  • Learn broadly → Attend 1 SEV or design review; observe recurring problems and system tradeoffs.
  • Connect cross-functionally → Chat with 1 XFN lead to understand context and dependencies.
  • Reflect & share → Write 1–3 bullet summary of key learning; note patterns, scripts, or principles.

Monthly Habits

  • Host & lead → Run 1 design or postmortem discussion; practice influence, articulation, and framing decisions.
  • Mentor → Coach 1–2 engineers; amplify impact and demonstrate multiplier behavior.

Quarterly Habits

  • Ship a measurable improvement → Deliver 1 end-to-end enhancement; design for scale, reliability, and visibility.
  • Summarize impact → Convert results into metrics or story for internal/external visibility.

Focus Blocks & Best Practices

  • Protect 1–2 hours weekly for important but non-urgent work: blindspot review, systemic improvements, or skill expansion.
  • Frame all incidents/projects with business impact: root cause, mitigation, downstream effect, prevented loss or restored capacity.
  • Ask system-level questions before implementation: downstream effects, hidden dependencies, assumptions, failure modes.
  • Document & share patterns weekly: recurring issues, scripts, or solutions that others can reuse.
  • Use external framing: translate internal improvements into transferable, marketable impact.

Watch Out For

  • Local optimizations without system or business context.
  • Not documenting key decisions.
  • Avoiding cross-team or ambiguous problems.
  • Over-relying on internal tech; always extract general principles.