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Notes -
Why discontinue an actively working service?
I ask this and I know the answer, but it still frustrates me.
Amazon just sent me a message that their "palm" services will stop working in June. It is just a palm scan print. Why is this hard to maintain?
Facebook portal used to be a go to easy video chat service and have other things that easily tied in like Spotify. They've discontinued it and Spotify is no longer a supported app. I dont even know how much longer the video chat portion will even work.
I'm looking for video replacement options if anyone knows of any good ones. The stuff I see on search is ass. Some of the senior service crap is more than the price of a cheap laptop for basically a webcam service.
It may be cheap on the scale of Amazon/Facebook, but it's usually not how it works. It's on somebody's budget, that somebody is a middle manager, and he should show how much money his work is bringing to the company, to earn bonus and promotion. Telling his boss "Shut down this service and save $X/month" is one way to do it. And any service that is not championed by somebody important and not producing cash is always under the sword of Damocles. Google is doing that all the time, shutting down very popular services, just because.
It's even worse, both managers and ICs are given bonuses and promotions for doing something important; "kept the lights on in a mildly unpopular service with no growth potential" is not a career-boosting result. This means everyone flees the team maintaining this service like rats flee a sinking ship. It's a vicious cycle, and even if at some point the service ends up with a stable skeleton team that is happy to just keep it working, from a mile-high perspective it still looks like "a mildly unpopular service with no growth potential managed by a team of C's", which translates to "nuke the service, dissolve the team and put everyone involved on PIPs".
Unglamorous jobs have their audience too. I am pretty close in my career to the point where taking a boring, well-paid job would suit me just fine. I am not there yet, but likely in another 5 years I will be. I mean, I am not averse to glamorous and exciting ones, just it's not the only acceptable option for me anymore. Of course, it has to be worth it - if it's boring and pays peanuts, no thank you. So maintaining legacy system is not that hard, if you are willing to pay for it. Of course, top management in BigTech Inc. wouldn't want to, why would they.
This is something doable in a large non-tech company. You won't be safe for life, but when another long, painful, expensive project to replace the system you're maintaining finally looks like it has a chance to succeed, you will still have enough time to move to a different position by the time it finishes.
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