Cost of running it includes engineering salaries, so isn't a good measure to include when you measure productivity of engineers. A productive engineer would be worth a higher salary, but if you include the cost of that higher salary reducing his value would that also reduce the salary you want to pay? Doesn't make sense.
Then from the internal market economics PoV, here's how it looks:
Engineering: costs (salaries + infra) are covered by revenue (services rendered to exec team).
Executive team: costs (execs salaries, expenses to pay engineers and sales for their services, accumulating interest to be returned to investors if any) are NOT covered by revenue (which comes from customers).
I find this decomposition incredibly neat and enabling solving the right problems.
Cost of running it includes engineering salaries, so isn't a good measure to include when you measure productivity of engineers. A productive engineer would be worth a higher salary, but if you include the cost of that higher salary reducing his value would that also reduce the salary you want to pay? Doesn't make sense.