When corporations stop being small they commonly turn plagued with some of the issues the centrally planned soviet economy had, unless the executives and bosses

When corporations stop being small they commonly turn plagued with some of the issues the centrally planned soviet economy had, unless the executives and bosses realise they are in a centrally planned organisation and meticulously guard against such problems. I suspect that explains some of the examples in the thread. Sometimes you also put people on busywork so you don't have to fire them, because you don't want them going to your competitors or have to go through the drudgery of hiring replacements later on when the times have changed again. Once me and my two developer colleagues were put on building an extension for an existing SaaS-product, the assumption from the higher-ups were that another customer segment that is also subsidised by the government would be profitable to sell the product to. One board member with background in Google couldn't keep his fingers out of it so it boiled down to putting two people who had never built software with static typing or the regular mess of web client tooling suddenly having to use TypeScript and a bulky UI lib based on Vue. We spent four months, one 'man-year', me trying to both put out fires in production and figure out how we were to tack on TS onto the horrifying PHP application we had and also teach my teammates how to approach problem solving with static typing and 'reactive' (or whatever the kids call Vue-related frameworks). In the end we managed one view with a decent search form that sent a string and rendered some rows with pagination. At that time fires in production started to threaten cash flow so it got shelved. It was a crappy idea to begin with, the new market had very different characteristics and actors in it many hard demands that we would have needed to spend quite some time, probably upwards a year in a setting my colleagues were comfortable with rather than TypeScript. Having an almost trivial integration with the tax authority to ease using that subsidy didn't change that, it turned out.