There's no glossing, I just don't understand. It's also far from my corner of technology. Still, between 3 devs and thousands, that's 3 orders of magnitude. Le

There's no glossing, I just don't understand. It's also far from my corner of technology. Still, between 3 devs and thousands, that's 3 orders of magnitude. Let's take the core team and 30x them for a broader project. Add 50 (?) for billing. Another 50 for web apps. Another 30 for general devops? That takes us to a "mere" 220 devs. Then I read that Uber had around 2,000 SEs in 2020, and Airbnb at some point was 1,200. I don't know how to grok that. You mention AWS, my impression was that even many very large orgs run their their hardware in the cloud (surely not all but still).