Comment by OrvalWintermute
3 years ago
> Engineers in particular are usually very highly paid Cost Centers, which sets MBA’s optimization antennae to twitching
disagree completely with this.
I view scientists, engineers, programmers, and system administrators as a part of the profit center because they are intrinsically tied to value creation and value amplification.
> I view scientists, engineers, programmers, and system administrators as a part of the profit center because they are intrinsically tied to value creation and value amplification.
Its a perfectly sensible view. unfortunately not one shared by your typical bean counter. MBAs routinely buy out companies and gut the value creation parts to increase valuation for short term gain before pawing off the hollowed out shell to the next owner. its sick but widespread.
It depends on the company.
For software companies, sure! Unless you're in DevOps or DevTools then you're a cost center again.
For an insurance company or restaurant, not as much. It depends on where the flow of money is.
Things are changing though, so this is less true over time as software continues to eat the world.
Agree with your disagreement! Whether classified as cost center or profit center largely depends on the type of company or organization. For the first half of my career, I would agree with OP: that engineering was viewed as a cost center. However, after transitioning to a software company, me and my teammates were generating revenue.
Yeah this is an important point. Amazon viewed themselves as a software company almost from the beginning. Now a considerable portion of their business is from AWS because of that mind set.
I think this article is an insult to MBA's intelligence. Today, they know perfectly well the value of code monkeys aka programmers.
Do they? Plenty of places still put IT down as a "cost center" first and foremost, using that as a basis tobproactively run their staff barely above the level required for maintenance alone.
Conversely, they also tend to believe their value calculations are better than those of dev teams, going as far as to ignore proposals. You think MBAs are able to consistently guess better than someone actively doing the work?
The whole idea of a “cost centre” is nonsense anyway.
A useful word for describing the optimization of something that adds shareholder value is appreciated by those who consider it.
It depends if it is a software company or not.
> I view...
well, you're not a MBA or a decision maker so your input here is mute. People are the means of production for a technology company and people cost money. This isn't complicated. And make no mistake, great measures are taken to minimize costs.
Whether you label something a profit center or cost center is irrelevant to the authors point. The significance of the conclusion remains true regardless of the label used.