Love this post. Surprisingly controversial; it hasn't made me very many engineering friends.
New energy crisis this year, the servers held, the company made a lot of money from new contracts via a combination of getting lucky with long-term buy-in contracts and the servers staying up unlike the competition. But there were no heroes, no praise to e.g. the developers putting in the extra hours, etc - it was business as usual, or business as it's supposed to be.
The work is invisible, and impossible to "show off", so it's a bit unrewarding and demoralizing. But hey, someone needs to do it!
It's why senior developers should end up in management or in positions of making decisions, but it's a completely different type of job to software development, where reason and objective truth and whatnot is barely relevant compared to social skills and connections. (this may be inaccurate, I'm not in that 'layer').
In one case, ten years later, the company is still struggling to maintain their Scala applications in an environment where there's barely any Scala developers (and who charge a premium because it's specialist work), while the main author(s) went on to work at the company behind Scala itself. I'm sure Scala is great for specific use cases (just like every other non-top-10 language out there) but please, think very carefully before trying to build your company on top of it.
I've found it extremely useful over the years, personally.