Because you don’t have enough work that really needs doing, at least in that particular area. You cut engineers because the bottleneck to increased revenue isn’t software features or bugs, it’s marketing/sales; human beings’ limited attention for which there is now more competition than ever; and customers’ available funds.

ETA: this is sometimes (though not always) very different for a mature company than an early stage startup.

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otikik 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That is a very convenient message for marketing and sales people. The fact that their whole job is crafting messages shouldn’t raise any eyebrows.

	▲	mattkrause an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Ha! I’d never thought about it like that but…yeah. I suspect another big part of it is that marketing and sales are relatively easy to measure and to scale. You can hire one, two, or three new salespeople and expect that revenue will change more or less proportionately. Fixing (or ignoring) a handful issues doesn’t scale so smoothly—-there are jumps where the product suddenly seems much better/worse.