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Comment by iainmerrick | Hacker News Reader

"It's really an exciting field because you can have a group of 2, 3 or 4 people produce something that is used by hundreds of millions or billions of people using your software and benefiting from the capabilities that it has. There are very few careers where small groups of people can have this kind of influence..."

Why do they need tens of thousands of engineers, then?

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They make a ton of things - if you're part of the 10 person team working on let's say - the "Search" button - clearly millions of people are using your software - but the impressive part isn't the UI of that button it's the "magic" behind it.

I'm guessing Jeff Dean is not a typical Google engineer.

For whatever reason the non-technical public has this impression of Google engineers (or just engineers in general) as really smart people who do things they don't understand.

This is the impression typical Google engineers have of Jeff Dean.

To make hundreds of projects, obvilusly.

I would say most of Google's products that eventually reach the bigger mass are black swans. Best way to reproduce them? Add a lot of stress, tens of thousands of engineers is quite lot stress.

I literally facepalmed at your comment. Google does so much that it's a miracle they get all this done with tens of thousands of engineers. Companies that create CRUD operations have upto 200k employees doing just that.

What companies have 200k employees to build CRUD operations?

Yeah that's a bullshit claim right there. IBM might be one of the only companies in the world with O(200K) engineers, and I sincerely hope parent comment doesn't think IBM does CRUD.

IBM does six hours of meetings, two hours of CRUD, and then four more hours in the evening fixing a problem the offshore dev team delivered without testing.

And at the same time they managed to ship Watson.

The initial team was less than 15 people.

> "During 2007, the IBM team was given three to five years and a staff of 15 people to solve the problems" [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)#cite_note-ny...

Right! This stabs at the heart of the issue, which is that some engineers gets to play the cool games (in fact very few), while most engineers are answering support tickets or putting out on-call fires. And this is no different than anything else, it's all about who you know.

Regardless of truth - this made me laugh out loud :D

What is going to infinity when you are measuring the asymptotic upper bound of IBM's engineer count?

Besides, O(constant) is pretty low.

Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro, TCS etc..

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