You're right, but this assumes that the execs have the insight to see that maintenance tasks save money. If preventing next year's incident isn't understood as being as valuable as doing the hero work to untangle this year's incident then it can be hellish unless you like hero work.

Well, that is also why large segments of the big corp work environment check out and do the absolute minimum - or even create chaos to make it less obvious who is doing what for whom.

Because the paycheck is indeed useful for them, eh?

This is why small companies can compete. What they lose out on economies of scale, they gain on avoiding this.

They can also get completely nuked by market forces a lot easier.

Also, pay is usually a lot less.

These people are comfortable collecting a paycheck despite providing little value. I'm not.

Do you like working with those people? That's part of it.

Some of them I do, some not. They generally believe it's their bosses' responsibility to make sure their work is valuable. I guess that makes sense, but I'd like to own that responsibility myself.

Sounds painful!