i.depreciate()

It’s interesting to think about yourself in the job market. How did you emerge? I came out of school and couldn’t find anything. It seemed that the jobs I was looking for weren’t available. The thoughts and ideas that I had, “be the best in your class” and “go above and beyond” drove me to believe that I would inevitably land an incredible job for a Google or the next big tech company. I finally got a byte (yea I just went there) to my many casts into the stream and landed at a web development shop.

Why do I bring this up? I’m trying say that I had an incredibly inflated vision of my worth to a company. This isn’t to say that it was necessarily innaccurate, although it was it’s irrelevant. All that I am saying is that my personal valuation of what I could provide to a company was fairly high. But, what I didn’t realize how little I was actually bringing.

Think about it this way. A company spends a great deal of time, effort, and resources in both people and materials to hire you, bring you up to speed, and then keep you happy over your time with that company. This isn’t a simple equation, but keeping it basic it looks like this:

recruiting + resources + salary = x

‘x’ is the monetary value that you are supposed to be worth to the company. That’s right, asset value. As with most things in accounting that hold a value, they depreciate unless more money is put into them each year. This is not giving you a raise or doing a review. Instead, this appreciation only comes from you, as an employee, getting better. This could be conferences, books, feeds, or even sitting in on a code review. Otherwise, your value to the company goes down each year.

That is called depreciation. When you purchase/build a house, the value doesn’t stay the same. You need to invest more to get more. This means time and money. If you can keep yourself on top of what is going on in the world within your field and be able to handle many situations, you’re keeping yourself classified as an appreciating asset.

I say all of this because it has helped me over the years to realize my actual worth to a company rather than my inflated view. If I never evolved or got any better, then I would still be where I started, which is casting lines into the stream. In fact, I’d be worse than that, because I’d have depreciated.