What does it mean to be a cost center?

When I shared my piece on Measuring an engineering organization, one point I made was that focusing too heavily on optimization metrics (e.g. things like CI/CD time) can turn engineering into a cost center. That’s not because optimization metrics aren’t important, they’re extremely important! Rather, it’s inherent to what it means to refer to an organization as a cost center.

First, an obligatory definition from Investopedia:

A cost center is a department or function within an organization that...