> their value is, at least in principle, calculable

I feel this article does not spend enough time investigating the challenges of directly measuring the financial output of an engineering team. I agree it is theoretically possible, but I don't think the full answer is that people got lazy on cheap capital and didn't care enough to measure. I think it would be exceedingly difficult to put a dollar amount on the monthly output of most engineering teams due to the variety of tasks they cover, and the extreme challenge of knowing exactly why your customers are behaving a certain way. If you get 1000 more signups in a month, is that directly attributable to the engineering team's output? If anyone could have been concretely answering that question this whole time, I don't think they would have been ignoring the metrics.