[schnable]

I'm having trouble with this framing. The buckets only make sense metaphorically, but is written literally. The "laws" only make sense literally, too.

For maintenance, if "you'll see this role smeared into product development" and "We give you a generous 2 days every sprint to take care of shit that's annoying," the budget here is R&D, not "Maintenance."

Similarly, Growth and Developer Relation engineers are often (usually?) in the Product org.

If these roles are actually in the R&D/Product Development budget, the "laws" about budget management don't apply cleanly enough that they can be a "law."

[jrochkind1]

Right, I read that situation as they've gotten rid of "maintenance" budget altogether, because it was so de-valued -- you won't find any software engineering jobs actually attached to maintenance budget anymore in such an organization -- and now what maintenance is done is done in the margins of jobs whose primary purpose is R&D, attached to R&D budgets.