alt Hacker NewsThere's a lot of value to be extracted in the period between "we fired all the qualified staff" and "oops, we lost all our customers due to unreliability". In physical industries that may happen sooner or in a more alarming way - you discover the loss of your safety personnel in the form of, say, a refinery explosion. But in software you can just .. break stuff, and leak personal data, and deliver a service which is down quite a lot (see github discussion passim, or endless complaining about Windows 11), and nobody goes away. Partly because software switching costs are so high, partly because the alternatives have the same problems.
This sort of thing happened to, for example, Maplin.
The big poster child is sadly Twitter. A lot of people said it would collapse without 90% of the staff, and that hasn't materialized. I suspect they can't deploy huge changes to the backend, but they never did that much anyway.
(also, those of us not in the US and not in FAANG always wondered how such a steep salary differential could have been maintained forever; more than doctors and lawyers? Comparable to finance bros or the fabled quants? All of those are much more onerous jobs with much harder entrance criteria!)
Software companies so far have been getting away with it, because the industry is relatively young versus others, and outside high integrity computing liability is yet to be a common expectation.
If everyone asked for returns, or sued, software companies the same way they deal with other goods, the atittude would most likely have changed by now.
Not to mention the whole EULAs ("we don't have any idea what we are doing here, please sign") disease.