It's really not any more complicated than this. It's disappointing to see this response so far down the page. If the answer to the question 'How does the company make its money?' is anything other than 'by continually producing high quality software', then it's not even a conclusion, it's just a tautology to say that it makes its money for reasons other than its ability to continually produce high quality software.
I think many programmers want to believe our work is more important than it is.
That leads to ignoring simple observations about reality like this one, since this one implies that in most companies software doesn't matter much and the CEO is right to treat it as a cost center. Nobody wants to hear that about what they do with their life.
To be fair, you could run 'sed s/programmers/humans/' on my first sentence and leave its truth value unchanged.
