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Regarding this specifically, I think it's incredibly funny how many of the fired employees claimed this. I understand when it's a journalist thinking websites are like some kind of mechanical clock and if there is no one there to crank it every moring it will stop. It's incredible that engineers would say "yep, the system we built is such a massive pile of shit that the moment we turn away it will fall over, shatter in a billion small pieces and no one will be able to even restart it".
A truly amazing endorsement of your own work. Much like walking around with a t-shirt that says "I have a small penis", even if it's true it should be divulged on a strict need-to-know basis.
A system that doesn't need you is a system that puts you of a job. The best (for you) is a system that doesn't need you but you tell everyone that it needs you badly.
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Eh, as a dev eventually if no one was at the wheel some bad data condition or external change would eventually break something that only someone familiar with the code can fix in a timely manner. Especially when you're doing new development constantly things break all the time. I wasn't really willing to weigh in on either side of whether things would break. If the firings included everyone who knows how a particular system works and that system goes down for some reason, maybe some certificate goes out of date and no one can access the functional account that has sole management rights over that certificate you could see some big pain. It's possible the core platform really is so robust that you could leave it running without touching it for years but it'd be the first such application I've heard of.
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