This is more about Silicon Valley start-up culture than about how coding itself works in a perfect world. Here's an example of how extreme it gets. Imagine you

This is more about Silicon Valley start-up culture than about how coding itself works in a perfect world. Here's an example of how extreme it gets. Imagine you work in a commercial-facing start-up that blows up seemingly overnight. In those kinds of companies, you'll have a core product that got super popular but was built by a small team. But now the investor money is coming in and everyone is taking about "throwing more coal in the engine". The company has to keep showing growth to keep investors happy but they essentially got lucky with the original idea and have no idea how to repeat it. In an attempt to accelerate growth, management spins up 10s of new teams to build out new lines of business. They'll hire a bunch of product managers who will come up with lots of new spin-off products that need to be built ASAP so the CEO can talk about them with investors in the next quarterly call. All of a sudden the company has an ad-tech team, a customer loyalty tech team, an affiliate marketing team, a local retail commerce team, a physical gift cards team, a "whatever mobile SDK Apple announced at the last WWDC" team, and so on. And all these teams need supporting services so you get another wave of new teams who build supporting services. And of course now no one is really working on the original product that is generating the revenue because it won't get anyone promoted since it is already "mature". Everyone has moved on to new teams where they can "make a bigger impact" aka claim responsibility for moving a metric so they get more money. Jump forward 24 months later and almost every one of those ideas will have failed to gain any real traction in the market and definitely won't have made a profit. But now a business that used to be run on a simple monolithic web app maintained by 20 people has been replaced by a 1000 person dev team building 75 microservices to power all these new verticals. But when all the new verticals fail to grow much, all the best developers move on in search of new projects more likely to get them promoted so you end up with a second wave of 2000 fresh college replacing them that all in aggregate generate barely any additional value over just having kept the original webapp going with the original team.