[wastedhours]

At my old company we had an innovation consultant come in and tell us that kind of approach was nearly impossible to manage in the longer term. Apparently teams dedicated to holding the fort grew bitter and had much lower retention than teams on greenfield work.

Paying back the debt, he said, usually requires too much knowledge of a system to cycle teams in and out consistently enough to ensure everyone gets a piece of the new versus the old to keep them engaged.

Whether or not that was backed up by hard data, I'm not sure. It was an interesting angle I hadn't previously thought of though.

[spockz]

Calling it “just holding the fort” would indeed be disadvantageous. If instead the teams would be empowered and rewarded for also keeping things running and improving on them it will attract the right kind of people which do grow the product and don’t get bitter. However, I have yet to meet an engineer who is comfortable maintaining a sunset product and in the mean time getting only flak about the performance of the old sunset application/feature or their own performance.

[dane-pgp]

> Apparently teams dedicated to holding the fort grew bitter and had much lower retention

As someone who found themself in the "holding the fort" team, I can confirm that this analysis is at least anecdotally true, although the terms I preferred at the time for the two teams were Morlocks and Eloi.

[spaetzleesser]

“Apparently teams dedicated to holding the fort grew bitter and had much lower retention than teams on greenfield work.“

Very true. The good performers will be “rewarded” doing the things that are really important: keeping things going. And then you have low performers and interns doing the new stuff.

[nitrogen]

That can happen too, though I think you're saying the opposite of the parent comment.

[r0ze-at-hn]

Worse than the fact that those holding the fort would leave, the best of those would leave (either to another company or just as often to the exciting new projects) leaving behind those that can't leave and very rapidly you end up with a not that great group which management doesn't notice or deal with.