This. Attrition often doesn't appear until the next vesting cliff / bonus. If leadership is not careful, they could lose a lot of key people all at once. For a big company like Google this is easy to stomach (they still pay well enough that _someone_ can be made to do the work eventually) but this could well be death to a startup.

Even an understaffed team can crawl along with a skeleton crew for a while, but you will burn people out. A burned out team ceases to make forward progress and is going to act like things are in maintenance mode. You're liable to spend more money and SWE-hours looking for backfills vs if you'd just kept your team intact.

How about “ I stopped changing my oil every 50 miles and my car runs fine”

that is more like it.

Or we fired 1/2 the scrum masters, so now each project only gets 50% of one instead of a FT one, and BTW, all of a sudden developer meetings get cut in half as a side benefit.

Every large company I have ever worked for could have easily fired 1/3 the staff and ran just fine indefinitely - but only if they fired the right third.

In my experience usually the real benefit would have been if they hired the right kind of positions. No, not "hire better developers/etc".

Hire for positions they don't hire because they seem superfluous.

I think in every bigger project over the last 10 years I asked, in otherwise reasonably staffed companies, for a technical writer. Even part time one. Fohgeddaboutit. Sometimes the issue is, as sacrilegious as it sounds even to me, not enough managers. Because sometimes you need people whose only role is to be communication points, or people whose job is to be responsible and accountable.

In most of those companies we could probably fire a lot of people too, probably mostly among executives and a lot of those invested in SAFe and the like...

It could be you’ve been in the wrong all those ten years.

Is Google doing mass layoffs every few weeks?