Comment by alephnerd

> You can tread water for a while while understaffed, yes. But that's not a secret engineers were unaware of. The titanic took 4 hours to fully sink; same concept with a business as large as twitter.

The brutal reality is that engineering degradation doesn't neccesarily impact business outcomes - look at Crowdstrike following the Windows driver incident.

Companies purchase software because the alternative means building in-house. Even in a world with Claude Code and Cursor, that is difficult for companies that are not tech-first.

If engineering degradation impacts profit centers, then it is rectified ASAP. Sadly, a lot of dev work is maintainance work for which it is difficult to make a business case to justify staffing.

> I suppose games studios also use buzzwords when it makes them more money

Somewhat.

A major reason a lot of entertainment is trying to rebrand as "tech" is to demand better valuations a la Netflix, Spotify, Epic, and Valve but those are all platform-first plays that entered the IP later (excluding Epic and Valve ofc) not the other way around like traditional media is trying, and in a lot of cases traditional media was a loss-leader or prestige division of much more profitable Telecos or Tech companies (eg. from Sony Pictures eons ago to Apple Studio today).

The mechanics of VC and Entertainment do overlap somewhat, but the operational differences between the two are massive due to the need to monetize IP in a B2C manner in the entertainment space, whereas monetizing via Enterprise, B2B, and B2B2C is much easier.