> Profit at any cost
Yes, but I think you're overlooking a hugely important factor in all this...
You boss is just some average manager that very often could even be below average.
Your boss is under their own pressure to perform and most of them will similarly struggle because they're not that good.
Most workers at any roles are just average by definition. And the higher up you go, the more timing and luck plays a role, and the less good meritocracy is at filtering people. As luck becomes a bigger factor up the management chain, leaders tend even more towards being average at their job.
Even founders, they often have never done this before, leading a fast growing company is all new to them and they learn as they go.
What makes a good founder is the guts to be one, and than having the luck of timing and right idea. Plus being able to sell a narrative.
What I mean by that is, they'll want to optimize profits, that's literally the charter of any company, and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.
But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.
Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.
Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.
It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.