The business terms are "cost center" and "profit center". If you do IT for a financial firm, you are a cost to be controlled. If you do product development at a software company, your work contributes directly to profits and the more of you there are, the more profit they make. I can add that aside from software, consulting also treats programmers as profit makers although clients will see you as a huge cost. Good companies know that IT facilitates their work and should be treated with respect, but that mindset is still the exception rather than the rule. The one an interviewer told me I had asked an excellent question, was to ask how IT is viewed within this (financial) organization