TD Ameritrade doesn't employ anyone? These newspaper jobs also existed until today while being unprofitable the whole time so it's likely the business would've closed even sooner with other owners.

Most pubs are 100% programmatic now, nobody is doing direct deals at small local news sites. And pubs dont need big dev teams for ads, SSPs are cheap and easy or they can use the standard header bidding wrappers. Yield management is always a moving target but not particularly complicated.