Very true and unfortunately an attitude which I've seen hold many good engineers back from career growth. Enlightenment comes when you are able to recognize that the non-technical roles are also trade crafts where the clever hacks involve constructing valuable relationships and managing perceptions, essential in every business.
Can you expand on this? How does a business person hire himself when he finds an engineer with a good idea?
Edit: Interesting that I got a downvote for saying the equivalent of the other comments here. I should figure out how to be clearer.
I didn't mind and I think it was a helpful response, but ya, thats probably why.
If the programmer mentions that you're lacking in SEO, show up the next day with a plan to boost SEO rankings. Even better, show up tomorrow and show what you did to boost SEO rankings.
The easiest way to hire yourself is to just start doing stuff that is highly valuable.
The slightly less easy way is to impress somebody every time you open your mouth, and be there when they need somebody.
Our company started as one engineer. Second employee was a "business guy" - who stuck his foot in the door and kind of hired himself. Two years later, we are roughly twenty employees large (half contractors) and seven digits of revenue, largely thanks to employee #2. :) Engineers can sometimes be quick to dismiss the value of other roles (I know I have), but without the aforementioned employee, we would have no where near our current revenue (he locks down the contracts and ensures good revenue from them, two things no one else in our company is good at).