[ianmobbs]

Sure, if you treat and account for engineering like a cost center. The reason big tech companies are so successful are precisely because they treat engineering like a profit center. Though sales may be the organization actually bringing in revenue, without a product, they wouldn’t have anything.

[jo032]

Well of course you need a product. What I'm saying is that the median engineer at Big Tech does very little to influence it in any meaningful way(at least that was my experience, and people I know who have worked at Google/Facebook)

A tremendous amount of value was created by the early engineers of course and they still have top performers shipping new things. But as somebody who worked at one of these companies early in my career well after its monopoly was established, I felt like I was just given busy work to do.