I wonder if this is in fact even worse, keeping people "occupied" in money-losing companies, where if the company went under they might (especially in tech) fin

I wonder if this is in fact even worse, keeping people "occupied" in money-losing companies, where if the company went under they might (especially in tech) find something productive (in the literal sense of producing something of value) to do. That seems more likely especially in a case like this, where the employees are skilled, and where the company isn't doing anything unique (novel, charitable, beneficial to society in a nonprofit way, etc) that would merit rating it by some other metric than profit. It just seems tremendously wasteful to be losing tons of money in a market where there's already a lot of competition and you're not doing anything new. This isn't an electric car, and AI, a space company, where the outlay might be a lot and the time to develop the tech is great, this is a long-established market full of already-solved-profitably problems. I would guess most of Xero's employees are outside of NZ, but since NZ's primary export is dairy, the government might be foolish enough to try propping it up with some nebulous hope that "keeping the tech industry afloat" will somehow be beneficial, rather than letting the few technologists in their employ go to work for another, more useful company, or to go and start a startup of their own (perhaps with government funding, in lieu of it going to Xero, in that hypothetical situation.)