I used to work in vendor professional services. After the salespeople closed a deal that hit the sweet spot between your needs, how much money you were willing to spend, and the sales guy’s quota, I’d come in to explain what you really bought, how much it could do, and figure out a plan to use what they bought to get them at least part of the way to their goal.

Customers hated me because I was always telling the something less than the salesperson did. They also were not crazy about paying me to give them bad news. Salespeople couldn’t handle me because they couldn’t hide their sales puffery during my implementation efforts. The rest of the company was perennially tired by my team asking for one-offs or advanced techniques to make impossible things out of what our customers bought. This is what it’s like when you’re not near the money: the rest of the rig feels like it’s working at cross-purposes and you’re a cost center.

Meanwhile my sister is a commercial lender at a bank. She writes loans. That’s a pretty good example of a person who cannot help being in line with the money: not only is she selling the company’s product, but the product is actually money. Whereas when you’re out of line with the money you’re constantly forced to justify your working existence, the guy in line with the money can just take a slice of the deal.

Work on revenue-generating projects/products. When push comes to shove, cost centers are cut first. If you work on search ads at Google, you have a lot of job security. I wouldn’t want to work on customer support tools there…

There's usually a team that is directly responsible for the part of the product that generates revenue, and management loves them. Every other team is basically just support and may be necessary but they don't get as much attention.

Make things that people use happily. That's the only thing matter. Microservices, K8s, noSQL, chat GPT integration, SPA, all are secondary. Don't make a hammer that no one uses. Think about how people use it, how people sell it, how people manufacture it, how people fix it. Don't silo yourself into whatever specification the world scoped you in.