Or they could just be asking gotcha trivia. It’s hard to tell.
It sucks, but this is what happens when the job you’re interviewing for has no license or certification requirements (but pays six figures).
1.5M lines is the output of a team of hundreds of developers over years. I don't believe anyone would write a million lines during a job.
2PB a month, is 125B documents at 16kB each, or 50k documents per second. That's decent. That's where it starts to be interesting in elasticsearch or hadoop.
About 200K lines of code is auto-generated.
A more appropriate estimation would probably be about 400k lines per year as some of this code did a big mass migration and refactoring during this time but I wrote that code as well. Just in the past.
KLOC is a shitty metric anyway.
I'd rather write 100 KLOC that worked vs 10000KLOC that was horrible.
But in most cases. Its not very difficult to write 1.5 million lines of code for any project if you are writing code of the style AbstractClassFactoryFactorySingletonDispatcherFacadeInitializer
That sort of the code is basically 90% auto generated by the IDE. You write the remaining 10%.
As a matter of fact I would find it a tad little hard to believe that some one wrote that much(1+ million LOC) and didn't find a way to template it or do some metaprogramming work.
Patterns always emerge from that kind of pile.
I don't think a developer would write a million line at work in their entire lifetime.
I'm not saying it's impossible to achieve. I've seen outsourcing agencies deliver 100k lines with just a few block copy/pasted many many times, but that's neither working nor maintainable software.
;)
After about 5 minutes of this I literally said:
"Dude, have you seem my resume? I literally built a petabyte scale full text search engine and wrote 1.5M lines of code to do so and a HTTP framework that parses fetches more than 2PB of HTML per month. If there's some edge case that I might miss I can Google it in 30 seconds".
I no longer keep small tactical issues in my head. It's pointless. Now I try to understand the system as a whole.