[pllbnk]

I think engineers tend to overestimate the value they bring. _Most_ companies make money from business deals that are written and signed into contracts, sometimes those deals involve automating stuff, that's where software engineers are useful. If a company loses some rock-star engineer, the automations they worked on don't break immediately, there's some time for other engineers to figure out how it works. If something cannot be delivered in a timely manner according to the contract because engineering branch got weaker after a rock-star left, companies either have to pay some fraction as fines or may agree on deadline extensions, however the contracts have been signed, the money are flowing, all the holes will be plugged eventually by other engineers.

Anecdotally, I have been recently approached by someone who was very eager for me to consult them on the product they were going to build. After a few hours of talking I quickly realized that they don't really need to build anything complex. In fact, my advise was to only focus on the core functions which are very simple and leave the majority of actual work to be done manually by a much cheaper secretary-type role until the product got enough traction to actually benefit from automation.