> "They want to solve a customer problem by creating, marketing, selling and/or supporting a software product. Your management wants to know that all the money

> "They want to solve a customer problem by creating, marketing, selling and/or supporting a software product. Your management wants to know that all the money they are spending on your salaries is getting them a positive ROI." This is all true for the somewhat narrow field of commercial software development for the consumer end-user where profit margins determine success or failure in terms of paying off the capital investors, but many organized engineering efforts have other goals, e.g. replacing some organization's decrepit internal data storage, archiving and retrieval system where robustness matters more than anything else, or designing a research program aimed at solving a complex technological problem, writing software that controls an electrical grid, and so on. Applying the maximize-short-term-profit mentality to such problems generally doesn't end well.