The disconnect is more between long term business value, and short term benefit for the most parasitic and manipulative actors within the business.

Engineering and business value go hand-in-hand in a healthy tech/engineering business.

A business that was built on great/innovative engineering, became successful, and then got taken over by various impostors and social manipulators, who's primary goal is gaming various internal metrics for their own gain, is not a healthy business.

That is, until planes fall from the sky.

Only if there are is organizational disconnect… which is the norm.

I think that’s a bit unfair. I’d say shipping a product that solves a problem is the baseline entry fee into the market, just table stakes. Profitability is determined by the machine built around the product, like the efficiency of capital deployment, the speed of distribution, the defensibility of the business model against competition, etc. The product is just one variable in a much bigger equation.

Ime, a lot of the onus falls on Engineering and Product Management failing to make a case for why certain engineering decisions (eg. Investing in continual tech debt grooming) have business value.

The point of a business is to generate revenue. The point of employees is to do work that helps generate revenue. As such, any decision needs to ensure it has a business case aligned with revenue generation.

Good engineering hygine has significant business value such as in speeding up delivery of new features as well as keeping certain customers happy, but in a lot of cases there is an inability to communicate from either direction (eg. PMs not giving Eng full visibility into business decisions, and Eng not being able to explain why certain engineering choices have business value). If you cannot communicate why this matters, you aren't going to get it prioritized.

Unsurprisingly, at big organizations, communication can take the backseat because communication is hard and at a large company, there is some amount of complacency because the product is good enough.

Edit: Unsurprisingly got downvoted.

The only reason you are employed is to make value (which generally is measured in revenue generated). You are not paid $200k-$400k TCs to write pretty or a e s t h e t i c code. You can make a case for why that matters, but if you choose to bury your head in the sand and not make that case, I have no sympathy for you.

* Product folks over-promise

* Engineers are consulted for estimates to facilitate long-term planning

* Middle management slashes those estimates in half due to pathological myopia

* Executives enforce musical chairs to assert their authority

* Consultants muck everything up while collecting enormous payouts

And yet the business cycle keeps cycling.