Re:"Normal" engineers are the key to great teams
by WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW on Thursday March 13, 2025 @10:31PM
(#43359080)
> You think Google has 5,000 people working on novel design spaces?
Yes.
Maintaining a bridge is in general not novel. There are clearly established best practices that have stood the test of time.
Maintaining a ridiculous tangle of millions of lines of code is novel. There are no best practices on par with other engineering fields. We are at the stage of rough heuristics in most parts of software dev.
One day there will be broad and consistent over time agreement on how to handle large software projects. But we aren't there yet.
Re:"Normal" engineers are the key to great teams
by freddie_mercury on Friday March 14, 2025 @02:59AM
(#43360239)
IBM's S/360 was millions of lines of code in the 1970s. Managing millions of lines of tangled code is not novel. It is older than most HN readers.
Google has something 25,000 developers. You think Google has 5,000 people working on novel design spaces? That number sound way, way too high. By at least an order of magnitude.
And Google at least has customer facing technology compared to the thousands of companies whose developers only work is, say, integrating HR systems or deploying SAP or maintaining some legacy billing system.