Every tech company has an A team and a B team.
The A team gets to work on all the flashy features, the things that management and the C suite usually brag about. They're technically very capable, not dogmatic, and fast. Management sees them as the "rockstar engineers". Their promo docs write themselves. They have an easy time surfacing business metrics to augment their argument for promotions.
Then there's the B Team, equally if not even more competent. They are deeply accustomed to the implementation details of the abstractions they use, they can be counted on to fix P1 incidents.
Both of these teams suffer from positive feedback loops. The A Team will continue to get work that gets them accolades, and those services will end up being maintained by the B Team.
The B Team will increasingly be given the A team's services to maintain after the A team moves on to new flashy projects. The issue here is that maintenance is an invisible part of software to management, and often treated as a cost centre. For that reason, the positive feedback loop for Team B is that they'll be relegated to be the unsung heroes of maintenance. Its much harder to argue for a promotion when "nothing happened this quarter" is an incredibly successful metric for maintaining a service.
AI is an exponential function for both of these positive feedback loops: the A team can pump out more code and flashy features faster, the B team has exponentially more software to maintain.
