[danny_taco]

Your impression comes from the fact that you have not worked at larger teams, as you said so yourself. It's relatively easy to build something scalable from the beginning if you know what you need to build and if you are not already handling large amounts of traffic and data.

It's a whole different ballgame to build on top of an existing complex system already in production that was made to satisfy the needs at the time it was built but it now needs to support other features, bug fixes and supporting existing features but at scale while having 50+ engineers not step on each other and not break each others code in the process. 4 friends in the basement will not achieve more than 50+ engineers in this scenario, even when considering the inefficiencies of the difficulty in communication that come along with so many minds working on the same thing.

[ratww]

GP said they have never work on something that truly needed 50+ engineers. Truly being the keyword here IMO.

I have worked on a 1000+ engineer project and another that was 500+, but I'm on the same boat as GP. Both of those didn't needed 50+, and the presence of the extra 950/450 caused several communication, organisational and architectural issues that became impossible to fix on the long term.

So I can definitely see where they're coming from.

[exikyut]

I've long wondered what I might be able to keep an eye out for during onboarding/transfer that would help me tell overstuffed kitchens apart from optimally-calibrated engineering caves from a distance.

I'm also admittedly extremely curious what (broadly) had 1000 (and 500) engineers dedicated to it, when arguably only 50 were needed. Abstractly speaking that sounds a lot like coordinational/planning micromanagement, where the manglement had final say on how much effort needed to be expended where instead of allowing engineering to own the resource allocation process :/

(Am I describing the patently impossible? Not yet had experience in these types of environments)

[fragmede]

Yeah, exactly. There is overhead simply because of the (necessary) cross-communication at that scale, and there's overhead from legacy support, but here's a thought experiment. Imagine that you've built the most perfect system from scratch that you can think of. Fast forward five years, and the business has pivoted so many times that system is doing all sorts of stuff it just wasn't designed for, and it's creaky and old. It just doesn't fit right anymore and even you want to throw it away and build a new one. So you form a tiger team full of the smartest people you know to greenfield build a new one, from scratch, but that's gonna take two years to write. (You think, hey, maybe we could just take this open source thing and adapt it to our purposes. To which I say, where do you think large open source projects come from‽)

How do you bridge the two systems? You build an interim system. But customers want new features, so those features need to be done twice (bridge+new) if you're lucky, three times (existing+interim+new) if not. Could a smaller team of 10x engineers come in and do better? First off, thanks for insulting all of us, as if none of us are 10x-ers. But no. There's simply not enough hours in the day.

We've all heard of large IT projects that failed to land and said "of course". But we don't hear about the huge ones that do. And plenty of them do land, quite succesfully, with these 200+ person teams where I, as an SRE, don't know the code for the system I'm supporting.

None of this is visible from the outside.