Comment by JSR_FDED

The amount of knowledge in the heads of the engineers and socialized through storytelling with each other is immense, and immensely valuable. Really smart customers know this too, and some would refuse to reorder or renew their maintenance contract unless they got guarantees that “their” engineer would continue to be assigned to them.

I once had a shouting match with senior management of an East Coast company I worked for because they wouldn’t do what was necessary to avoid an experienced Sales Engineer from leaving. To them these were “headcounts” you just replaced when they left, zero understanding of the years of accumulated undocumented knowledge that would walk out the door. Literally the difference between successful deployments and catastrophes that required expensive fixes and escalations. MBA thinking at its finest.