[shagmin]

I find it kind of hard to define success or failure. Google search and Facebook are a success right? And they were able to scale up as needed, which can be hard. But the way they started is very different from a government agency or massive corporation trying to orchestrate it from scratch. I don't know if you'd be familiar with this, but maybe healthcare.gov is a good example... it was notoriously buggy, but after some time and a lot of intense pressure it was dealt with.

[fragmede]

The untold story is of landing software projects at Google. Google has landed countless software projects internally in order for Google.com to continue working, and the story of those will never reach the light of day, except in back room conversations never to be shared publicly. How did they go from internal platform product version one to version two? it's an amazing feat of engineering that can't be shown to the public, which is a loss for humanity, honestly, but capitalism isn't going to have it any other way.

[SoftTalker]

Are you saying this from firsthand experience? Because it sounds like the sort of myth that Google would like you to believe. Much more believable is that their process is as broken and chaotic as most software projects are, they are just so big that they manage to have some successes regardless. Survivorship bias. A broken clock is still right twice a day.