Companies don't suffer. That is reserved for the living. The depressing part is the large amount of waste here. Wasted time, wasted opportunity, wasted money.

Companies don't suffer. That is reserved for the living. The depressing part is the large amount of waste here. Wasted time, wasted opportunity, wasted money. Wasted lives. What you're doing here is known as the broken window fallacy. The same developers could be developing meaningful things. They could be learning, like adults do, how to clean up after themselves, and so lead richer lives. The people forced into being code janitors could spend their time making things that actually get used. Or everybody could just do less work and go home early, doing things they care about. And speaking of use, let's note that the waste impacts the users and the world. The users could be getting better software. More useful features. Fewer bugs. New products, new ideas. They could also avoid a lot of the chaos that comes when a company dies of pernicious waste. For example, note that the original browser company, Netscape, failed due to poor code maintenance, letting IE take over. What might have happened if they had done better?