If anyone understands the concept of investment, it is someone in finance. To claim they only care about cutting costs maximizing revenue today at the expense of the future is ridiculous.
An amazingly uninsightful truism: people have a shallow understanding of topics that they are not intimately familiar with.
Perhaps this is why accountants and MBA types run businesses and software devs continue to just develop software for their bosses. You know, the ones who understand business more deeply. Because that's what they do. To misappropriate Sorkin: if software devs are so fucking smart, how come they lose so goddamn always?
People in finance don’t really understand or care about engineering R&D and long term investment in engineering culture, possibly because the effects of these things haven’t been quantified scientifically. It’s simply another line item. They do acutely understand the effects of numbers on their stock compensation though.
and people in engineering R&D and "engineering culture" (whatever that means) are completed disconnected from reality when it comes to making payroll. And i say this as a software engineer myself.