alt Hacker News> Your concern isn't about the money, your concern is about the product. That's what you're hired for.
According to whom? Certainly not the people did the hiring.
I somewhat agree that developers should optimize for something other than pure monetary value, but it has nothing to do with the hiring relationship, just the moral duty to use what power you have to make the world better. In general, this can easily conflict with "what you're hired for."
In this case I think showing suspicious (or even all) invisible Unicode in PRs is even a monetarily valuable feature, so the moral angle is mostly moot. And I would put the primary moral burden primarily on the product management either way, since they're the ones with the most power to affect the product, potentially either ordering the right thing to be done or stopping the devs when they try to do it on their own.
As a developer you have a de facto primary concern with the product. They hire you to... develop. They do not hire you to manage finances, they hire you to manage the product. Doing both is more the job of the engineering manager. But as a developer your expertize is in developing. I don't think this is a crazy viewpoint.
You were hired for your technical skills, not your MBA.
I agree. Though I also think this is true for many things that improve the product.Also note that I'm writing to my audience.
How I communicate with management is different, but I'm exhausted when talking to fellow developers and the first question being about monetary value. That's not the first question in our side of things. Our first question is "is this useful?" or "does this improve the product?" If the answer is "yes" then I am /okay/ talking about monetary value. If it's easy to implement and helps the product, just implement it. If it requires time and the utility is valuable then yes, it helps to formulate an argument about monetary value since management doesn't understand any other language, but between developers that is a rather crazy place to start out (unless the proposal is clearly extremely costly. But then say "I don't think you'd ever convince management" instead of "okay, but what is the 'value' of that feature?"). If I wanted to talk to business people I'd talk to the business people, not another developer...