Both actually kneel to marketers and sales tbh.

Look at any high paying industry/job, apart from FAANG tech or doctors - it's either marketing or sales at the end of the day. I'll go so far as to say that even most doctors in the US are in the sales business.

100%. Engineers and creatives rarely contribute directly to revenue the way marketing and sales does.

I kind of didn't want to put the statement out that way actually, although I didn't delve much deeper.

There are places where engineers' and creatives' opinions are valued and taken into account when making decisions, for instance certain quant funds or Hollywood studios. If you want to not be considered a second-class citizen, so to speak, work in a place where ideally your job isn't just coding or building content, but also convincing others of your own ideas (sales) and building consensus within the organization to back them (marketing).

I think this is a big part of why there is such a thing as a tech company. If you think about it, it's a weird concept to exist otherwise as basically every company uses technology. But "tech firms" as we know them are really "firms run by geeks". The people who can't get respect unless they create their own companies where they're on top from day one :(