As mentioned earlier, depending on your company, tech can be thought of as a profit center or a cost center. Usually, if technology is the product you are selling, your team is a profit center, and if technology is helping your company succeed, you are instead a cost center. If this is rubbed in your team's face too much, it can feel like an insult. Engineers are builders and creative types, and some may feel unmotivated or depressed to be thought of as not an integral part of the company's success. This is utter nonsense, but it happens. One way to remove it from your team's mind is to fight harder for a larger budget. Often, engineers only notice the difference if they find that they cannot do things they want to because things are not in the budget. The team's manager probably needs to do a better job of helping their manager or executive team to understand the value their team is providing and how investment in them improves the company overall.

This often comes up when evaluating new technology, when figuring out how much a piece of tech is going to cost, what it is going to take in terms of people hours to implement and become useful, and how it will improve the company. Helping people to understand the cost/benefit ratio of a decision will often involve using the terminology mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. Some decisions might seem obvious to you, like paying $20 per month per server for improved monitoring. However, if you do not bring up the fact that it will help prevent outages, which cost the company $10,000 in 2016, or that it is needed to do capacity planning for time periods longer than a month, you may never get the money you need for your project. Moreover, maybe, just maybe, the company will falter due to lack of capacity.