A friend of a friend told me about an organization that has a steady income from existing products maintained by just enough engineers to keep the lights on, while the other 80% of the organization is building the “new version” that no customer asked for and that nobody is currently paying for. There’s one product that is used by more than 80% of customers that’s maintained by 2 developers and that the CEO isn’t aware even exists.
Ya I've been there. I even tried pitching to management that a small team of us wanted to move to the legacy product and iteratively improve it because it had customers and revenue and we could make an impact while the new product was under development. They said no. I left about 6 months after. 9 years later the legacy product is still running. I can't find any evidence that they launched a new one.
