Back in the day, it was known around the IT circles at Nordstrom that project work in general was a “nice to have” and that if it were necessary, any and all new development tasks and capex could be scuttled and IT reduced to a bare-bones support staff.
Imagine like the old SAT group (does it exist any more in a devops world?) and maybe 100 or so pure maintenance developers, fixing important bugs only. No projects, no stupid mobile apps, no changes to the web site outside of the templates contents by selling staff, just what is now.
And those lucky few who remain would be grateful to have a job at all, at whatever salary.
Is something like this still possible? Coming to a corporate center near you?
God I hated the SAT flunkie I had to have run my scripts in production. What a useless human being.