[nine_zeros]

This is one of the main reasons why incidents, outages, dev environment breakages need to be surfaces up to the C-Suite. Put a $ sign on all of them. Show that these are increasing over time - which it is always.

The CEO then asks, how can we make this better? The savvy CTO and VP says, we need more engineers and more headcount and retention to merely flatline the increase. Get the headcount and raises.

Do this every year because the nature of software is that it is not a spend == returns. It is a spend to even keep the lights on - it is a bespoke utility that builds your business and gets customers to pay you - thus requiring constant maintenance.