There's not really an equivalent with most service industries. Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running.
Can you tell me where you work, and are you hiring???
And, for now at least, advertisers on twitter can't sell products to these bots. So lost money.
Also initially they had a lot of breakage.
If the factory workers don't show up for work, your factory's output immediately drops to 0%. If none of your software engineers show up, most of your company's code will continue to run, some of it in a degraded state, for a while. (How much depends on your sub-industry, and how much you're outsourcing to AWS). And if you can get 5% of your workers to show up, you might be able to handle 90% of the on-call load.
I think the record single instance uptime on a customer site was most of a decade, running a TV station.
That collapse didn't happen.
Sometimes an issue arises and without that deep knowledge you'll be waiting weeks for a fix. Better hope it isnt a critical issue like a serious vulnerability or that you can hire the deep knowledge on a temporary consultancy contract.
Sometimes services are fully rewritten from scratch because the new devs cant get a build of the old service to compile/run/do the thing™.
PagerDuty wouldn't exist if this were true.
It also doesn't mean nothing breaks when people aren't making changes. Certificate expiration is the classic example of something breaking _because_ someone hasn't made a change. Or a slow memory leak. There's a whole classification of issues that get worse when nothing is redeployed for long enough.
Sure, a platform will continue to run on a given day without intervention, but that’s like playing Russian roulette: at some point you’ll need intervention and you’ll likely need it fast.