They mean doing the processing that Splunk does is expensive so there simply needs to be less data going into the system (via the pre-processing steps I mentioned) above in order to keep costs sane.
With that said Splunk should offer such a pre-processing product (maybe it does?) which would probably increase their moat even though it reduces revenue somewhat in the near term.
This is the root of so much of our software quality problem. “I want to work on something shiny” outweighs “I have pride in this software and want to keep it healthy.”
Personally I love working on legacy software, I actually dislike greenfield projects, but even in the context of legacy software and system maintenance, backporting fixes would still not rate highly or provide much in the way of interesting work for me.
I'd say there's enough software developers that enjoy doing the latter. It's mostly the external motivation (both in community standing and in payments) that push people to shiny new things.
Are you flagging the word "sexy" or are you asking whether some important projects are fun and exciting and other important projects boring?
Surely maintaining 40 year old bank Cobol code is important but it's not considered fun and exciting. Rewriting half of skia from C++ into Rust is arguably not important at all but it's exciting to the point that it reasonably could make the front page of HN.
