In this case you should immediately fire all your engineers, your CFO, and your COO. Because why would you want to employ a team of engineers who are costing you money but bringing you no value?

You should also fire your cleaning staff, who have never closed a deal in their lives, plus the plumber who most days dosen't even come in.

Granted, engineers are required to create products and maintain it. You need product to sell.

But at the marginal level for every dollar your sales person makes your engineer is not. You might argue but the product is generating revenues but that's not what drives a sale. A sale is a function of value derived from the product and the price paid for it. Engineers aren't driving the sale unless the product itself is a developer tool. But even in that case the top level business controllers will always have the final say. In the end, buying such developer centric tool is about minimizing cost expenditure.

There is critical proprietary knowledge and experience that is formed from a sales person that is driving revenues. Businesses do not want to lose the hen that lays the golden egg as they are hard and expensive to replace.

Engineers on the other hand are easily replaceable and are expensive because they cannot generate revenues. They are not efficient when pulled away to a sales meeting from the work they are doing. Their knowledge and skill costs businesses time and money with no way to get it back directly. It must be sold, money collected and redistributed to all the payrolls. That's the main risk a business owner or a CEO is dealing with where as the engineer collects a cheque at the end of the month with little to no concern or exposure to that risk.

Society rewards risk takers disproportionately at the corporate level. Even if it's tough to measure to the Board and investors losing a C-level executive is always going to be more impactful than a senior engineer who has far more workers to replace him as a result of being cost intensive.

Find me an engineer that can code and sell, now that is a truly rare hybrid, a mewtwo, but it will still be more expensive than a guy who just sells (and does well).

A poor salesman understands this better than anyone, his weight is worth the revenues he generates. For engineers it's the efficiency / dollar or output / dollar that they are competing against which is always headed towards commoditization and any business would replace them with an AI that can code if they could if it cost less.

A typical Econ 101 textbook says:

    higher demand --> higher price
    higher price --> higher supply
    higher supply --> lower price
    lower price --> higher demand

But even if we believed your demand causes supply causes zero price model, why is that unique to engineering and not business acumen? And why do programmers get paid anything, don't they work for free?

Programmers have largely driven themselves to zero, just take a look at the workers on freelance websites and how much difficulty a native English speaking freelancer has against an army of commoditized labor.

There are still six digit earning engineers and always will be but you can't look at that as a metric for the massive commoditization that has occurred with generic programming in the past 15 years.

I'm a freelancer and fully booked, so maybe those low cost competitors aren't so competitive after all.

(it cuts the other way too: if an oversupply of labour in a field as difficult-to-learn as ML does arise, the demand shortage causing wages to fall is almost certainly because ML techniques aren't giving companies and traders as much of a financial edge as they hoped for...)

Added bonus for the ML experts: in a lot of the possible areas they can choose to work in, their individual marginal contribution to the company's profitability is at least as quantifiable as that of a salesperson. In many areas of finance you can quantify the impact of an individual line of code!

On the other hand, it's easier to piggy back off the hard work of highly paid experts in this space now commoditized into 1/10th of a cent per application of an ML algorithm from Microsoft or Google or IBM.

Commoditization is going to be in full force as businesses realize they can just have a junior developer to plugin IBM Watson or Azure than hire an expensive PhD student who may know everything under the sun but cannot compete against an army of highly paid experts completely under the control of a highly collusive labor market.

Silly google, they must've skipped Econ 101 since they hire tons of engineers and are doing TERRIBLY!

Why would I go to you and not a VC firm? I sure as hell don't want to work for someone like you....

(oh and there are plenty of others like Karpathy, like Facebook, Baidu, Microsoft, Uber, Amazon, a metric fuckton of startups, etc. who are being paid ridiculous amounts of money to build nets)

Guess who's getting replaced once the VC figures out who's doing the work...