[sfteus]

This was one of the larger of many reasons I left my previous company, which was a holding company that owned several products with similar audiences and feature sets. They bought a new product at the beginning of the pandemic that was deemed the primary replacement for the rest.

Basically spent ~3 years as the sole developer on an application in "maintenance mode" that kept getting more customers since it supported a bunch of features the intended replacement didn't. That increased client base wanted new features in the maintenance product that leadership wouldn't turn down. The product still maintained a turn-around time an order of magnitude less than the primary replacements.

A few days before I tendered my resignation, the company had laid off about half the development team for the primary replacement (even though they had contracts promising work that was planned to take 12+ months with the full dev team), and declared a different product as the "primary replacement" for the other ones they held. Don't know how that will work out for them, don't really care either.

New place has a standing policy that basically says if we can prove a maintenance system is taking more than a few hours a month, they'll authorized repairing/replacing/removing said system. It's incredible how much of a difference it makes on employee morale not needing to constantly context shift to spend a few hours fixing some broken system over and over again.