This sounds quite remarkable to me, and definitely does not match my experience. I've found that most engineers have an incredibly vague notion - at best - of how their companies make money. And it is, IME, a vanishingly small set of engineers who would ever use terms like "product portfolio revenue stream", or "total addressable market", etc. And discussing revenue projections?!?? All I can say is, you've worked with some folks who do things very differently than the folks I've worked with!

Absolutely.

What is almost certainly true is that a lot of engineers as well as people in a lot of other groups can't conceive of why the company needs all those people in digital marketing or finance or partner management or ...

A friend of mine used to be a management consultant for one of the big firms. On one memorable project she worked with senior executives of a large ($1b + revenue) non-tech company that had retained the consulting firm, to do an operational diagnostic. It became incredibly clear that many of these senior execs had never really read the company's financial statements in any detail, that they did not understand that the company was cash flow negative, and that they did not know that the company's debt load was increasing over time as it financed losses with bond issuances.

At the same time they were spending incredible amounts of money on luxurious office furniture and trappings.

Stories like this were common. Most managers knew their area, but did not learn about the business more broadly. (Could be selection bias with firms that hire management consultants!)

So, kudos to the engineers who read these and have a rough idea of their company's financial position and how the business works. It's not clear that this is the median experience.

I don't think Microsoft could just make Windows and Office and survive this long. So if you're not on those teams your chances of actually making money directly instead of being expensive advertising dollars are negligible.

Similarly if you're not working on adtech at Google. Your job doesn't actually make money. If you think about it too much you might not be that happy with how your life is going.

I'd agree they don't know those terms, but people do generally grasp the concepts.

People do present financials at all hands meetings. I've certainly discussed the revenue projections with people, because we all found them hopelessly optimistic. Flat line suddenly increases exponentially for no reason.

I think the majority of employees in most business do not have much visibility into the financial machine that justifies their existence.

I joined a company that was a privatised spin-off from a large civil service organization. A new CEO interviewed each department head, asking them how their accruals were doing this FY. A couple, allegedly, said 'Our what?' and were immediately shown the door.

The next CEO, by the way, asked 'how many engineers do we have?'. The inability to answer that also led to some corporate soul-searching and eventually some major re-orgs.

accruals: Larger companies especially do accounting on an accrual basis. So what most matters is when the service was delivered or the product sold--not when the cash was received. (Large companies care about cash flow too but cash is king at small companies.)

Basically what's being asked is "In what ways does our cash balance not reflect our income and expenses?" Perhaps more common would be ask about bookings but accruals is broader.

This is one of those annoying things where I can talk about either concept, but don't know the language that serves as a proof of competency.

Purely from the outside, I'd guess that yes they're asking for the discrepancy. Maybe they're asking for accrual revenue but I'm not sure I've ever heard the term used that way. I would expect someone would ask for bookings if that's what they wanted. (Which can get even more complicated for multi-year subscription deals.)

ADDED: It's been a long time since I got my MBA but, with all the data in front of me, if someone asked me that question, I'd have to ask what they actually wanted and, if they fired me a result, so be it.

And then there's mistaking users for customers. If you're a McDonald's customer you might think their money comes from trading hamburgers for cash, and you'd be wrong on any number of fronts. If you're a McDonald's competitor, you would know that they make more money from fries, and way more money from selling soda (hence the discount for a meal). But if you're the McDonald's corporation, you know that you make most of your money from franchisees, who happen to sell burgers and fries and oceans of soda. You're providing logistics and real estate acumen for most of your money. The general public is their customer's customer.

I don't know if they still do but Burger King used to 'steal' McDonald's real estate acumen by building Burger Kings as close to the nearest McDonald's as they could manage. Let them get 10% or whatever higher profits by getting the correct corner lot in the right neighborhood instead of the incorrect lot in the right neighborhood, meanwhile we save tons of money on market research.