the same 3 core people stayed on the project for 11 years from the begging and hired and fired around weither you're a threat to their position. managers would come and go, they were helpless and held no real power in the project, until they settled for a puppet manager who would defer every decision up to them and act as a secretary.

the result was a huge pile of tech debt that only they could touch and they kept getting raises because the project couldn't afford to lose them, until the project died of it own weight.