[cryptica]

>> I would assume the majority of those engineers are working on less visible tasks: Devops, build systems, infrastructure monitoring, security, backups and data integrity, internal tooling for customer support, billing and accounts management, and other critical but otherwise invisible tasks.

Most of these other things are absolutely useless.

[dx034]

Companies saving money on backups pay for it at some later date. Also, you won't/shouldn't really pass any audit without sound processes in place.

Billing is easy until you have to serve 200 countries, each with their own regulation and tax systems. Sure, you can outsource that but it won't be much cheaper once you reach scale (as parts remain manual).

And I don't think many would agree that customer support is useless. As a developer, I wouldn't want every customer request to hit my desk. Having customer support that cannot only filter out requests but also respond in a less technical way than most developers is invaluable.

[eru]

Useless in what sense? And which of those things?

Eg backups and data integrity sound rather important.

Eg build systems are only useful as an enabler for the other things your company wants to do, true.