Beautifully said. Engineering is often just a cost center and I often have the feeling management is suspicious that the engineers are just wasting time and throwing up roadblocks for nothing. This in turn makes managers always on the lookout for "the shortcut" to cut out as many of those engineers as possible.

There is a definite lack of appreciation for the often repetitive grit, toil and maintenance work required to just have profit generating working software running reliably in production.