"If the company is left only with 20% of engineers (even the best ones), it will be way deep in survival mode (just barely providing support for an existing pro

"If the company is left only with 20% of engineers (even the best ones), it will be way deep in survival mode (just barely providing support for an existing product, not building some new exciting things or even improving existing ones)." This is completely ignoring the number of engineers you start with. Let's say you have Twitter with 10000 engineers and Twitter with 40000 engineers, in one case I end up with 2000 engineers, in other with 8000 engineers, you are telling me the result will be same? First you need to find out how big overemployment and how productive employees you have to come up with some percentages, some companies are efficient, some companies ar stagnating hardly introducing any new features over years (cough Twitter cough), so clearly there is big overhead of engineers.