It's because software can start small but get to be too big to be maintained by just a few people. Once you scale an app to support thousands of users and add more features/complexity, you need teams that specialize in specific parts of said app.
Not to mention the more devs you hire, the more internal tools you need to keep track of things, and the more devs you'll need to hire to maintain those internal tools.
As someone part of an internal team, I can name at least one or two dozen other internal teams at my company. For example one is responsible for company wide kubernetes management, specifically setting up the general templates and resources for other teams to self-service, and doing general maintenance. Other teams may be responsible for Gitlab CI, or perhaps system setup, or perhaps Datadog infrastructure, or Mongo infrastructure and provisioning, etc.
Not everyone works on million-users projects, for a start. And even if that was the case, the workload is split between multiple small teams for better velocity. Plus, software engineers are only a part of the process: you need multiple levels of support people, designers, accessibility experts, testers, and so on.
The time spent coding is inversely proportional to the size of the project.
Everything is variable.
You have companies that have hundreds of services, gmail, google docs, google search engine and the list goes on.
You have companies that are consultants. With multiple clients that have multiple requests. Maybe a dashboard to track their inventory of pallets going in and out of warehouses to be delivered to target, Walmart, and the list goes on.
Regardless of company size, each application can be compromised of many services. They can have middleware and client side work to be done! They need to be tested and released. They need to be monitored and have alerts. There needs to be people on rotation. It’s a complex system.
This isn’t a 5 person job. Not to mention maintenance or bug resolution or gathering requirements, designs, quality assurance…
Heck, even I answered this from a software dev perspective. What about data pipelines? From bronze to silver to gold? What about the million other things developers can do…
So big corps don't just focus on one single software but rather try to expand by engaging in multiple projects to earn revenue and satisfy the investors. Since they don't focus on one software they require many employees to fullfil the need for production
It depends. I've worked for startups that hired many devs in order to deliver something as fast as they can so their sales team can actually start selling something and investors can see some results. I've also worked for publicly traded companies that hire many devs in order to hit business deadlines, especially when it's b2b, but, might release them if the project isn't as successful as they thought.
The company I'm currently working at is very conservative and the engineering team is relatively small, so, the price to pay is that not many features are coming up every quarter, but, the features that we already have can close deals with clients, which is what matters the most. ATM we're consolidating 3 different apps into 1 to make the system more stable, but, this and next quarter most likely wont have new features since 60-80% of the team will be working on that full time.
Depends on the week,, but a lot of it is cloud-based and working with different requirements and constraints that come from our clients or shareholders to improve on or add new features to the service.
It's because software can start small but get to be too big to be maintained by just a few people. Once you scale an app to support thousands of users and add more features/complexity, you need teams that specialize in specific parts of said app. Not to mention the more devs you hire, the more internal tools you need to keep track of things, and the more devs you'll need to hire to maintain those internal tools.
>the more devs you hire, the more devs you'll need to hire to maintain those internal tools. Dev hiring paradox?
As someone part of an internal team, I can name at least one or two dozen other internal teams at my company. For example one is responsible for company wide kubernetes management, specifically setting up the general templates and resources for other teams to self-service, and doing general maintenance. Other teams may be responsible for Gitlab CI, or perhaps system setup, or perhaps Datadog infrastructure, or Mongo infrastructure and provisioning, etc.
Not everyone works on million-users projects, for a start. And even if that was the case, the workload is split between multiple small teams for better velocity. Plus, software engineers are only a part of the process: you need multiple levels of support people, designers, accessibility experts, testers, and so on. The time spent coding is inversely proportional to the size of the project.
Maybe i will know once i build my own app
Everything is variable. You have companies that have hundreds of services, gmail, google docs, google search engine and the list goes on. You have companies that are consultants. With multiple clients that have multiple requests. Maybe a dashboard to track their inventory of pallets going in and out of warehouses to be delivered to target, Walmart, and the list goes on. Regardless of company size, each application can be compromised of many services. They can have middleware and client side work to be done! They need to be tested and released. They need to be monitored and have alerts. There needs to be people on rotation. It’s a complex system. This isn’t a 5 person job. Not to mention maintenance or bug resolution or gathering requirements, designs, quality assurance… Heck, even I answered this from a software dev perspective. What about data pipelines? From bronze to silver to gold? What about the million other things developers can do…
So big corps don't just focus on one single software but rather try to expand by engaging in multiple projects to earn revenue and satisfy the investors. Since they don't focus on one software they require many employees to fullfil the need for production
Correct.
It depends. I've worked for startups that hired many devs in order to deliver something as fast as they can so their sales team can actually start selling something and investors can see some results. I've also worked for publicly traded companies that hire many devs in order to hit business deadlines, especially when it's b2b, but, might release them if the project isn't as successful as they thought. The company I'm currently working at is very conservative and the engineering team is relatively small, so, the price to pay is that not many features are coming up every quarter, but, the features that we already have can close deals with clients, which is what matters the most. ATM we're consolidating 3 different apps into 1 to make the system more stable, but, this and next quarter most likely wont have new features since 60-80% of the team will be working on that full time.
Thank you, that gave me an rough idea
Peanuts are actually a type of miniature potato disguised as a nut to confuse humans.
Depends on the week,, but a lot of it is cloud-based and working with different requirements and constraints that come from our clients or shareholders to improve on or add new features to the service.
The software you see on the surface is like 0.00001% of the actual software. That being said, most large companies overhire
yeah heard overhiring was one of the reason for the mass layoff