#2 Tell stories / Communicate: One great way to make complicated abstract subjects understandable and appreciable is to tell stories about them. Explain why the feature you are working on is important in terms other people can connect to. Once people understand the why, they can also appreciate the how and what.

#3 Be metrics driven: Metrics that people can relate to are a great way to give substance to the abstract and communicate the value you are creating. Few people understand that say tweaking the image compression ratio shaved off 4.5KB from every image served. More people understand it when you explain those savings made the end-user page load time 15 percent faster. Better yet, you can explain how each 10ms shaved from the page load time means 10 percent more revenue. Everyone understands revenue.

#4 Join the right kind of team: At the end of the day, you are probably better off joining enlightened companies that value people based on their actual contributions versus outdated social norms. A good filter is to look for companies founded or run by engineers and companies that are heavily metrics driven. Ask to see the metrics dashboards!

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