Facebook is about an order of magnitude less, so the Apollo program fits nicely between them.

I realise looking back that comparing a company to a project/program isn't really correct. One kind ends, the other tries very hard not to end.

But you're of course right that I exaggerated a bit for effect. I do that sometimes.

My point still stands if you slice a few orders of magnitude off my hyperbole.

But the Apollo program and the Manhattan project were something else. Arguably they represent the historical highwater marks in terms of megaprojects which had effectively unlimited resources in the face of wide-open, unsolved problems.

[1] https://qz.com/726338/the-code-that-took-america-to-the-moon...

[2] https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11

[3] https://www.quora.com/How-many-lines-of-code-is-Facebook

...which, if I were to guess, consists of a significant amount of "do nothing" or otherwise useless abstractions that either were put there dogmatically or once served a purpose but no longer does. This is reasonably prevalent in Enterprise software but I imagine the much higher churn in Facebook code also increases the amount of cruft that gets thrown in or otherwise left behind.

Search HN or the Internet in general for mentions of Facebook's app being bloated and you'll find that even non-technical users are at least somewhat surprised by this gross inefficiency.

My personal experience has been that the label "web developer" is typically used by less experienced people if only because after a little while in the industry, even if your focus is primarily web-related, you start to develop skills that are more widely applicable and don't want to be "pigeonholed". It doesn't have anything to do with the difficulty of the problem set, the quality of the ecosystem, or any other specific value judgment.

It's the difference between a package delivery service characterizing their employees as "box movers" v. "logistics coordinators".