So few people understand this. Even engineers who undervalue salespeople misunderstand this as well.
No matter what your job is, at a company you either cost money or you bring in money.
You want to be on the "bring in money" side of the business 99 times out of 100. The career path of being "obviously valuable" and a bottom-line employee is difficult. While I've been there and it's rewarding, one change in management where someone comes in who doesn't "get it" and you're screwed (and usually so is the company).
You're right about where you want to be, because a lot of managers think like you do.
But if a person cost money and provided no value a rational company would fire them. Either almost every company is insanely dumb or you need the employees not directly bringing in wads of cash to support the ones that don't.
This isn't an original idea of mine, if you want to see discussion of the issue Google "cost centers and profit centers", the technical terms for those sides.
To provide a totally trivial example suppose your business is going to people handing out free money, taking the money, and putting it in the bank. Suppose different people in different locations hand out different amounts of money. Suppose you have a data scientist who predicts the optimal route for your money getters to travel. This person is a cost center, and firing them would be dumb. Now suppose you have a caterer who makes sure they don't need to leave for lunch...
Edit: Looking at your last paragraph again I think you might possibly agree with me? I'm not sure if that quote is sarcastic...
"cost center vs profit center" are the same thing as "bottom-line vs top-line" (as I referred to) just different audience.
I'm not saying that people that cost money don't provide value but your compensation will always be minimized by management and bad managers will look for reasons to remove you from the balance sheet, even if they're bad ones.
If you're bringing the company money, the company could be literally on fire and you can still command a sizeable salary.
If you're bringing in millions and could be replaced easily you'll make peanuts. If you're bringing in millions but don't negotiate your salary at all your employer will generally happily pay you less than your work is "earning".
If you're a dev for a newspaper you'll be paid around what other similarly qualified devs make irregardless of whether you work on their subscription system (allegedly profit center) or on the backend their journalists use to post content (allegedly cost center)
Edit: I absolutely agree our terms mean the same. That's why I said I was just providing the terms so people can Google existing articles on the subject.
So few people understand this. Even engineers who undervalue salespeople misunderstand this as well.
No matter what your job is, at a company you either cost money or you bring in money.
You want to be on the "bring in money" side of the business 99 times out of 100. The career path of being "obviously valuable" and a bottom-line employee is difficult. While I've been there and it's rewarding, one change in management where someone comes in who doesn't "get it" and you're screwed (and usually so is the company).