I work at a large public tech company with a bland product and sure you could lay off 90% of engineering and coast with no feature development for a good while (probably). The problem is when you want to staff back up, getting that 90% back won’t happen overnight and it’ll take years to get that efficiency back up. We paused hiring for just a couple months in my org once, we had something like 5% attrition during that time and it took 3x as long to get the hiring pipeline back up and it’ll take at least a year to get those people to be useful. Always Be Hiring.

> Most software can run in maintenance mode with minimal staff and no feature growth.

If it is well built, sure. At one of my jobs, one of the firehoses requires a messy restart every few days as it was left to decay and now everything is out of date.

Yea but an intern could keep that going for a few months if they had to, you don’t need senior engineers.

The point is that stagnation/KTLO is way easier than expansion and needs way less talent.

Typically, not really. If a software is badly built, it isn't as simple as following a set of well-described instructions. Random stuff breaks all the time due to hidden dependencies to other servicea, and debugging it is definitely not a job to be entrusted to an intern. If it was easy to restart, you could write a cron job for it.

> A hospital is dead without nurses.

So are the patients :p