What does it mean to be a cost center?

1 · · Jan. 20, 2023, 10:39 p.m.
When I shared my piece on Measuring an engineering organization, one point I made was that focusing too heavily on optimization metrics (e.g. things like CI/CD time) can turn engineering into a cost center. That’s not because optimization metrics aren’t important, they’re extremely important! Rather, it’s inherent to what it means to refer to an organization as a cost center. First, an obligatory definition from Investopedia: A cost center is a department or function within an organization that...