Is your team an investment? I know we (not me, someone else I work with) asked our CEO about a team not making money, and he responded yeah, they started the team knowing it was a ten year investment, now it is looking like a 20 year investment and they are fine with it. My opinion is the team in question will never pay off the investment, but it will eventually come close enough to break even and the goodwill they generate for the company more than makes up the monitory loss. (How do you count someone who decides to buy our most profitable product vs a competitors because we have an unrelated product they use)

We’re more like a necessary expense, what we do is moderately important and pull in some income, but not a lot.

When we win, it’s rarely acknowledged, as the output from other more core teams just seems more impressive, but when we fuck up, it looks really bad.

That's not necessarily (and probably isn't) sad, I can think of two general reasons for that to happen and it not be a problem:

- Growth, e.g. trivially everyone at a company that's yet to turn a profit

- Critical but not revenue-generating function

I mean basically that's 'line' and 'staff' from OP (but for line the subset of companies/teams that isn't profitable yet). The latter being a 'cost centre'.

If you don't like it ('what's sad is') then the article might be a useful approach/line of thought when looking for your next role - i.e. a 'line' job (at a profitable company on a team working on the profitable thing).

I've never had a job where this wasn't the case.