> According to whom? Certainly not the people did the hiring.

Actually yes, according to them. Maybe they'll say that you should also be concerned about the money but that just makes the business people redundant now doesn't it? So is it better if I clarify and say that the product is your primary concern?

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.

  > In this case I think showing suspicious (or even all) invisible Unicode in PRs is even a monetarily valuable feature

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.

  >> but HN is a space for developers, not the business people.

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...