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Because you don't make money deleting code. People at tech giants don't love their employers like they are their mother or something. They don't do things that
by lanza 3y ago
Because you don't make money deleting code. People at tech giants don't love their employers like they are their mother or something. They don't do things that don't get them rewarded. Implementing new features does.
And so engineers implement new features and write more code and release the features and get rewarded for doing so. Once the feature is done, if it's easy to delete it they will. If not, and it never is, they'll leave it around and move on to something else.
When you have 3 billion users if you make the company 1/100th of a penny per user per year you pay for yourself. That's like increasing the value of the average user by 1/200,000. So your feature doesn't even have to be that good. It just has to be minimally better than what it's replacing. Restyle a button to be more appealing in the peripheral vision of users and that probably breaches that threshold.
Reality is that it isn't quite this easy (fewer users are that valuable, most don't use it daily, etc). But it gets the point across. You work there to make more money and deleting some feature that is probably referenced by some other dead code somewhere else isn't profitable work for anybody.
- wpietri 3y agoWell that's a grim tragedy of the commons. Not that I doubt you at all, but how depressing!
- lanza 3y agoWhy is it depressing? Does some collection of people on earth suffer from tech giant apps having too many lines of code? It very effectively shovels money from these soulless companies into the pockets of the employees. No living entity is suffering, just the company from it's own bloat. I find it to be quite a beautiful result. Developers get to develop and not focus on maintenance. The lack of local maintenance creates repository wide maintenance jobs that are also interesting in their own right. It is tragedy of the commons. But really the only one who deals with the tragedy is the corporate entity.
- wpietri 3y agoCompanies don't suffer. That is reserved for the living. The depressing part is the large amount of waste here. Wasted time, wasted opportunity, wasted money. Wasted lives. What you're doing here is known as the broken window fallacy. The same developers could be developing meaningful things. They could be learning, like adults do, how to clean up after themselves, and so lead richer lives. The people forced into being code janitors could spend their time making things that actually get used. Or everybody could just do less work and go home early, doing things they care about. And speaking of use, let's note that the waste impacts the users and the world. The users could be getting better software. More useful features. Fewer bugs. New products, new ideas. They could also avoid a lot of the chaos that comes when a company dies of pernicious waste. For example, note that the original browser company, Netscape, failed due to poor code maintenance, letting IE take over. What might have happened if they had done better?
- userbinator 3y agoI don't think it's the feature count that's in question; it's the ratio of feature count to lines of code that seems abnormal.
- lanza 3y agoI actually don't think it's a ton. Go count the lines of code of one of your small projects. I have something I spun up in the evenings over a few days and it's 2000 lines. It feels like nothing. Tech giants have thousands of engineers working on these projects for many years and delete and rewrite features on a regular cadence. The fact that Messenger is only ~500 times bigger than my project is kinda weird to me. Mine has 1 user, it has 3 billion.