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Comment by afro88 | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly right IMO. I have never worked for a company where the bottleneck was "we've run out of things to do". That said, plenty of companies run out of actual software engineering work when their product isn't competitive. But it usually isn't competitive because they haven't been able to move fast enough

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I think it depends on:

A) how old the product is: Twitter during its first 5 years probaby had more work to do compared to Twitter after 15 years. I suspect that is why they were able to get rid of so many developers.

B) The industry: many b2c / ecommerce businesses are straightforward and don't have an endless need for new features. This is different than more deep tech companies

There’s a third one, and it’s non-tech companies or companies for whom software is not a core product. They only make in-house tooling, ERP extensions, etc. Similar to your Twitter example, once the ERP or whatever is “done” there’s not much more work to do outside of updating for tax & legal changes, or if the business launches new products, opens a new location, etc.

I’ve built several of such tools where I work. We don’t even have a dev team, it’s just IT Ops, and all of what I’ve built is effectively “done” software unless the business changes.

I suspect there’s a lot of that out there in the world.

Not moving fast enough.. sure. But to what direction? The direction and clarity of it is the hardest part.

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