It's bad that there are half forgotten systems but almost every sizable business that has been around for many years will have this. On mobile, but there's a famous story of a server that had been drywalled over and had been running just fine, unnoticed and unattended, for years.

It's good to see that maintenance is rewarded at Google at least occasionally. I only ever hear that it is only new products that are rewarded. And I notice new people piling on to issues in their product trackers that I've been following for years.

But consider incentives. If nobody gets promoted for doing it, nobody does it. Promotion for maintenance isn't a bad sign if your corporate culture is "hire the smartest people in the room and let them build great products;" you're going to have to incentivize maintenance somehow, and "maintain it or you're fired" is counter to your cultural goals.

Promoting people who notice impending implosions should also be SOP.

It’s not at all a bad sign. Any large and complex system will have parts rot from lack of maintenance, and giving awards to people who identify and correct this ahead of disasters is a good thing.

So... people shouldn't be promoted for keeping existing services running, but they should keep those services running as SOP? Sounds like a recipe for misaligned incentives to me.