> How do you think companies decide on budgets? From what I've seen, by horse-trading, and fighting highly political, bitter, zero-sum turf wars that depend wa

> How do you think companies decide on budgets? From what I've seen, by horse-trading, and fighting highly political, bitter, zero-sum turf wars that depend way too much on how charming department heads/directors are, and how well they relate to the CxO's and/or board. Its not uncommon for the CEO's pet-project to get a budget completely disconnected from the its value (current or future). Companies - like anything collective that relies on human judgement - are terrible at digging deeper than first-order effects; which is why sales people tend to get paid much more than the engineers who developed the product: "I closed a $X million deal, so I get Y% of it". The engineers get paid a flat rate, because it's impossible to quantify how much value they added, and when. Baseline engineer salaries are broadly determined by how much other companies are paying, and more specifically by how good the individual engineers are able to negotiate.