Comment by c_r_e_a_m

> If you're in the engineering, product, design, marketing, sort of the builder's side of that organization, you've got to know that you're creating a lot more value than that, possibly 10 times, maybe 100 times that value

Very dubious. From personal experience I'd guess that most non-sales employees at the big tech companies are actually creating negative value for the business (not contributing enough to profit to pay their comp and benefits). This mainly seems to happen for two reasons:

1. Career incentives for decision-makers (Eng. and PM management and directors) are almost totally disconnected from the profitability of the business. You can definitely become a superstar by building something wildly profitable, but that's the hard approach. The easier and more common approach is simple empire-building: Gather a larger and larger team, and have more projects and launches under you. The projects don't necessarily even need to intend to make or save money - you get to pick the metrics you target, and you can probably find some that indicate you're successful! The overall impact is mis-allocation of talent on a pretty grand scale.

2. On a more micro-scale (within teams), engineers are terrible at focusing on things that are good for the business. If you leave an engineering team alone, they will spend 90% of the time rewriting systems that already exist to make them simpler, easier to modify, etc. They will normally accomplish this! But the rewritten systems will do almost nothing to increase how much money the company makes, and it's rare that it will save enough resources to be worth it (engineers are expensive).

Both big tech companies I've worked at had what seemed like a relatively small set of teams focused on the core of the business, who were laser-focused on improving revenue or reducing the cost of core infrastructure used around the business. There were a much larger set of teams working on projects with less clear business value.