> It's always amusing to me how people who only work in one area of the company (ie. engineers, designers, sales, etc.) think they are the only ones doing "real" work. Everybody else is doing bullshit and wasting money. Without fail, every single time, if you give rank-and-file the opportunity to express this, they will.
Same here. I've spent my career hopping between functionally different areas - supply chain, IT, business operations, marketing, BI/Analytics, and a few hybrid/in-between roles.
As you said, every single time, each group tends to trivialize the contributions and efforts of the others.
They also tend to have very little awareness of their own unique privileges. When I'm on a business team, even if I'm doing technical work it takes an absurd amount of effort and approvals to even get local admin access to my computer, whereas when I'm on a technical team it gets rubber stamped and is usually part of the onboarding process. Same with infrastructure - if I need to set up a recurring process/script, it's pretty trivial finding/accessing infrastructure somewhere that I can plop that onto when I'm on a technical team. But god forbid I have the same need while working on a business team - you have to move mountains and requisitions to be able to accomplish the same thing.
There are privileges in the other direction, too. In particular, sales/marketing/account people expense an absurd amount of stuff in the daily happenings of their job, and can choose to do so with little fanfare. Whereas on the IT side, it can be near impossible to spend $10/month on something if there isn't a clear business unit to charge it back to and wasn't in the annual IT budget.
At the end of the day, every group tends to have different internal skillsets and organizational capabilities and restrictions. And all are working just as hard as the other to keep the sausage flowing, within the capacity of their abilities and role. The number of posts and comments on HN about devs struggling with marketing/selling their single person SaaS should be an indicator that you shouldn't trivialize any group's contributions before taking the time to fully understand them.