There are three ways to think about Engineering.

Engineering is a cost center.
A problem to be managed and kept within budget.

Engineering is a challenge.
Something difficult that must be handled carefully.

Engineering is an opportunity.
A way to create value.

The greatest companies tend to understand Engineering as the third.

Why?

Because Engineering scales.

An engineer can spend six months building something.

If it is mediocre, you got six months of work.

If it is great, it can be used millions of times.

A great system scales.
A great abstraction scales.
A great algorithm scales.
A great idea scales.

The value of Engineering therefore isn't proportional to the amount of Engineering you buy.

Great Engineering creates leverage.

Look at Amazon.

AWS began as an Engineering investment inside an online retailer. The question could have been: Why are we spending so much money building infrastructure?

Instead, Amazon saw an opportunity to turn Engineering capability into an entirely new business.

AWS is now a business with tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue.

Amazon has explicitly said that it would be a different company if it had slowed its investment in AWS.

That is the difference between seeing Engineering as a cost and seeing it as an opportunity.

And this is particularly important now.

AI can make Engineering dramatically more capable.

You can use it to reduce the cost of Engineering.

Or you can use it to increase what Engineering can create.

Those are very different ambitions.

I believe the second is where the extraordinary value is.

Engineering isn't a cost to be minimized.

It is an opportunity to be seized.