[fzeroracer]

Many critical people will leave. The problem is that issues of brain drain, process devolution and lost institutional expertise are effects that only occur years after the cause. When you try and figure out why all of your internal services are down because one core server is in a bootloop and the engineer with knowledge of it all has left.

Speaking from my own personal perspective, it's quite frankly scary how many teams and companies are running with skeleton crews because they've chased off a lot of competent engineers and think they can coast by with the bare minimum. Stuff like what happened to Boeing or Crowdstrike are great examples of the end result, and a lot more companies than you'd expect are operating right on the critical failure margins. The concept of redundancy has outright vanished.

[causal]

It's even more subtle than that. Things just start decaying when talent leaves- you often can't trace it to a single engineer or piece of knowledge that's lost. You'll find reasons why things broke- but you won't see the myriad ways a more talented pool of developers would have prevented it from ever breaking in the first place.

[artyom]

This is what's happening in my org, talented people was leaving consistently (5-6/month), things are currently maintained with skeleton crews -- the ones that are maintained, the rest are accidents waiting to happen.

Quality inertia is what's preventing stuff from crashing down instantly, but it'll eventually be the case. It's just a matter of when the last guy that's worth their role leaves.

Most "SDEs" attracted by past big money have below-minimum reading skills, can't write code, can't troubleshoot, can't debug anything even if they life depends on it. They were hired to form a particular structure for the manager two levels above to be promoted.

[fnfjfk]

I agree they may decline over time, but I don’t know how to disambiguate that from the general rot of big tech companies that have been around for a long time.

When Elon fired everyone, people said Twitter would collapse, but they’ve been technologically ok. They may be struggling on the business end but that’s more likely to be caused by the owner telling advertisers to fuck themselves and by him tweeting racist conspiracy theory stuff rather than any problems with their infra.

[foobarian]

FFS we're 3/4 of the way migrating our stack to AWS. They better not screw it up!