It sounds like they should have paid to keep you. That said, I've written software that I would expect would require more engineers to keep around long term, i

It sounds like they should have paid to keep you. That said, I've written software that I would expect would require more engineers to keep around long term, in production. Better testing, security, reliability, scalability, maintainability. I can say this without disparaging my own work (well, I probably deserve at least a little criticism) or the people who took over the project. Some software developers are really ingenious but a bit too undisciplined, great at understanding the business environment, and good enough at overall coding and architecture that what they build can be put into production without great risk or reliability, albeit with notable technical debt. In short, they actually build the tire rope swing,and without this kind of developer, the tire swing will never be built. It simply will not result from the 19 developer team you mentioned. But it takes a very different kind of discipline to convert this into something that can work long term, and sometimes people are genuinely shocked to discover how much it will actually cost to make that rope swing safe and reliable in the long term. By the way, I do want to make sure I emphasize that this isn't necessarily what happened in your case. Based on past experience, I have little trouble believing that you were simply replaced by a very expensive large team that didn't accomplish as much as you did along almost every axis, from maintainability to security to business relevance to innovation.