> You do need to innovate still, but that is now an intricate art of balance between not wrecking the ship and still being relevant. Is _that_ boring? I don’t k

> You do need to innovate still, but that is now an intricate art of balance between not wrecking the ship and still being relevant. Is _that_ boring? I don’t know. I want to try it closer to my retirement. It's probably experience bias but the maintenance phase orgs I have worked for were more like warehouses that kept systems on shelves and let them rot until all the customers bled away. These were mostly growth by acquisition PE companies. It was like working at a fruit stand selling only rotten fruit. We were never given time, budget, or resources for even basic modernization. Everything was firefighting. One team after acquisition, lost their devops team, and let their pipelines degrade over 5 years to the point they couldn't deploy anymore. I've seen on-prem solutions deployed 20 times to a VM across 50 VM's and called cloud. It took a weekend for the team to deploy (10-15 people because support had to manually test every env because it was so fragile). They also tend to attract and retain talent that is done learning and growing. I had an Ops Engineer at one of these orgs tell me in 2023 that no one told them they had to learn Docker. They know what they know, and they push back on anything new which in turn drives away engineers that do want change. Everyone knows it's broken but no one will commit any resources to fixing it. The business doesn't care as long as they are retaining. It's minefield and even when they talk about how committed they are to change during the interview you walk into fortified silos and no support or budget to break the deadlock.