In a company I used to work for, "sustaining engineering" was the team of developers that handled all of the bugs and issues reported by customers on old-but-still-technically-supported versions of the products. (The ones who worked on current versions of the products where just "engineering.")

So basically heroku will fix whatever is broken, but don't expect any new features or development.

From a business perspective, this means they will not be investing in innovation on the platform anymore. Instead, they will focus their efforts on maintaining the current operations and keeping the lights on.

Heroku has been running in this mode for a long time. The only difference is they made it official.

From a business perspective the have brought it out to the field with a shotgun.

As opposed to the relentless innovation they have demonstrated in the past 5+ years? /s

I don't understand the dismissiveness. I think it's pretty clear. Keeping it going for the current users, but not trying to innovate. It might seem weird in an industry that prizes constant innovation and disruption, but this is a mature thing to do.

Could have just said we will Keep the Lights on

This reads more like "we won't deliberately turn the lights off… but they're probably gonna break on their own eventually".

The lights will stay on until they burn out or the power goes off, or someone bumps the light switch or steals the light bulbs.

I am sure that the guy whose name is on the Post didn't even write this himself. Probably some corporate writer using LLM :).

I would love to see the prompt that led to that word salad

“In standard corporate doublespeak with lots of jargon…“, followed by whatever you want to hand wave away.

Or some kind of twisted brain with a "fake it till you make it! or continue to fake it" attitude. I think people doing that stuff for long enough almost have no other choice but to believe themselves, that they are doing net positive work, otherwise the cognitive dissonance would be too great.

We've been optimizing for decades to engineer the bullshit-generating super-soldiers required to craft modern PR statements.

Surely it's a typo and they meant "sustainable"?

Otherwise IMO such an odd word choice. Definition:

>> providing physical or mental strength or support

Sustaining is used in Engineering to mean that it's now post-GA and there is no further development. The platform is not End of Life but there are no more features planned.

They meant what they wrote. Merriam-Webster's definition: "to support the weight of"

It means they're transitioning to the absolute minimum to keep it alive and nothing more. That could, in worst cases, mean firing everyone except one guy, or using AI to keep it alive.

Sustaining as in sustaining their shareholders.

It's what CA/Broadcom does to literally every software product they own.