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A comment on All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people. Parent comment

Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by bluedino on Monday August 05, 2019 @07:57AM (#20613354)
>> Somehow we got to the Moon. But now companies are so bloated that even doing nothing requires 30,000 employees.

The Apollo program had 400,000 people involved at it's peak.

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Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by coldtea on Monday August 05, 2019 @08:17AM (#20613478)
Which is neither here, nor there.

The programmers for the Apollo software (which is what we're discussing), were at their peak, around 350 [1]. And most of those roles were secondary and only needed because of the primitive tooling and utmost reliability requirements that modern software doesn't suffer from...

[1] David G. Hoag, 1976 - http://klabs.org/history/history_docs/mit_docs/1711.pdf

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Re:All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technica... by papln on Monday August 05, 2019 @12:15PM (#20615300)
Apollo software is pretty simple, relatively speaking. It was a hard, but small problem compared to what we expect from modern tech like a car or airplane. Modern software is far more reliable than Apollo. The difference is that 99.9% correct-uptime is terrible for modern vehicle software, but was great for Apollo.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6361/success-fail-...

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