If you have incompetent people in your IT / SWE department, they're not going to make good hiring choices.
Similarly, corporate culture is very little about stuff and more about processes. If hardware or software environment problems exist, will they ever be fixed? At a lot of companies, no.
And "pay them what they're worth" is a relative metric. Non-tech companies aren't going to be able to afford to pay a cost center what tech product companies can pay a profit center.
> If you have incompetent people in your IT / SWE department.
Same for every other deparment. Incompetent people won't hire competent people.
> Non-tech companies aren't going to be able to afford to pay a cost center.
Isn't that a mislabeling issue? If software being better implied more profit, then it's a profit center. If your legal department being good means fewer legal fumbles, then isn't it worth it? Same for software. Yeah you can deliver mediocre software and still retain users, but that just leaves you vulnerable to competitors.
Profit- vs cost-center is pretty ingrained into a company's management DNA, for all companies.
From top-down perspective, it's a question of "If I +$1 to this department, what +revenue do I realize?"
In non-tech companies, that's a long or abstract link: "How does funding SWE help me sell more furniture?" In tech product companies, it's trivially obvious.
Tl;dr - always work for a profit center, never work for a cost center.
Similarly, corporate culture is very little about stuff and more about processes. If hardware or software environment problems exist, will they ever be fixed? At a lot of companies, no.
And "pay them what they're worth" is a relative metric. Non-tech companies aren't going to be able to afford to pay a cost center what tech product companies can pay a profit center.