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> no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again I don't think they'd ever cla

> no one will ever be able to credibly claim that they need thousands and thousands of people to maintain a single app ever again I don't think they'd ever claim this because these companies do way more than "maintain a single app". If companies don't attempt to innovate, even big ones, they lose in the marketplace. Meta for example has multiple apps to support, each serving hundreds of millions of users. On top of mere maintenance, they experiment and add new features. On top of that, what about the occasional greenfield/skunkworks type projects? It's a shame your friend worked on three consecutive projects that got axed, but that's a separate problem from him being able to coast without getting fired for it.

zer0zzz 4y ago
I work at Meta on compiler support for all kinds of apps. We regularly write and use some pretty aggressive compiler optimizations and we often experiment and evolve lots of compiler and programming language features that are really experimental for use in our apps and services. I don’t think you can directly compare an app like the ones a small team can build to the apps that larger more established companies have to maintain and evolve. I mean sure you could just do a full app rewrite and start from scratch but that’s hugely risky and certainly fails more often than it succeeds.
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  Facebooks compiler team basically exists because rewrites are crazy hard.