Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

Communicating tech debt and long‑term work

• Several comments stress that long-lived products require invisible work (maintainability, refactors) and that engineers must “sell” this to management.
• Ways to argue for it:
  • Frame in terms of schedule risk (e.g. “20% chance a 4‑week project slips a week because of this flaw”).
  • Use concrete comparisons (this task is 2 days now, ~1 hour post‑refactor).
  • Look for immediate benefits (fewer bugs, faster dev) and translate those into money or risk reduction.
  • Accept that sometimes “now is not the right time” and that prioritization is non-obvious.

Engineers vs management and who should ‘sell’

• One side: it’s broken that engineers must constantly justify obvious things like paying down tech debt; non-technical or “busywork” managers are blamed.
• Other side: management’s job is balancing many demands (sales, product, strategy); knowing “tech debt is bad” isn’t enough—they must choose which debt vs which feature, and engineers need to articulate tradeoffs in business terms.

Profit centers, politics, and promotions

• The article’s “work on what makes money” heuristic is widely discussed but many say it’s too simplistic:
  • In large orgs, what “makes money” is partly a social construct—re-orgs, leadership changes, and narratives can flip a team from “profit center” to “cost center” overnight.
  • Promotions often favor high-visibility platform or “strategic” projects (AI, greenfield efforts) over actually profitable but unglamorous systems (billing, infra, cost savings).
  • Visibility and alignment with influential managers often matter as much as actual value created.

Values vs profit: accessibility, safety, ethics

• Strong tension noted between doing “what makes money” and intrinsic values like accessibility, safety, OSS, or reducing cybercrime.
• Some argue these can be profitable via regulation, fines avoided, or new markets; others say they’re still systematically under-rewarded.
• Boeing and safety/SRE/QA examples illustrate how work that prevents loss is politically fragile, even if it’s existentially important.

Different environments: academia, startups, big tech

• Academia and research still require heavy “selling” (grants, publications, conferences) and can be as political as industry.
• Small startups can have harsher politics and cliques than big companies; a good team in a big company is seen as ideal.
• High-growth/big‑tech anecdotes show both overstaffing (invented projects, endless rewrites) and ruthless cuts, reinforcing that value signals are noisy.

Commodities, critical people, and maintenance

• Debate over whether engineering is a commodity:
  • Routine CRUD work is seen as more interchangeable; deep, specialized systems are not.
  • Healthy orgs avoid single points of failure but also acknowledge that people and judgment are not fungible.
• Mundane but crucial areas (billing, compliance, infrastructure) are repeatedly ignored until they break, even though they directly affect revenue and risk.

Emotional reactions and pragmatic takeaways

• Some find the article “sad,” describing a feeling of being a replaceable cog and seeing idealistic motives (helping users, doing good engineering) devalued.
• Others say this is just basic business reality: you are paid because you (should) generate or protect more money than you cost.
• Common advice:
  • Understand concretely how your company makes and loses money.
  • Tie your work—features, refactors, safety, accessibility—to that story in ways managers can defend upward.
  • If your organization systematically ignores real value in favor of optics, consider changing teams or companies rather than trying to fix the culture from below.