Re:Why big tech companies need so many people
by liotier on Friday February 10, 2023 @11:24AM
(#34741774)
Telco man here... Lengthening the site identifier from six to ten digits was an 18 months project impacting 120 applicative systems - not even counting the vast grey territories of regexes and office macros.
We are powerful, but setting ourselves in motion takes quite a bit of pre-heating !
Here is an example of code complexity: Changing an object from enum to String is trivial to do in a small codebase. Making this small change in a live system like Youtube becomes a 6 month long migration with multiple SWEs working on it, when you have to do it in a codebase with 10s of millions of lines of code.
A lot of complexity comes from code size, multiple teams may end up creating duplicating products/services if there is no standardization etc.