Yes, this is a constant sourse of amazement for me too! The chrome team at google is well over 1000 people. (The opensource code base now has over 800 committers). The initial release had 100 committers[1], so probably about as many man hours have gone into google chrome in the last year than were put into the project in its first ~5 years of existence or something. In the last year just shy of 1.5 million non-blank lines of code[2] have been added to the browser, which is more code than was in the whole browser when it was first launched, webkit included.

But what does all that new code do?? I'd challenge anyone who's not a developer to name a single new feature added to chrome in the last year. I'm a web developer and I struggle to name more than 5 changes.

Its easy to pick on chrome because the numbers are mostly-public. But the same is probably true of facebook.com, ms office and all sorts of other big company products. As features compound, the marginal value of each additional line of code added becomes vanishingly small. (All the really useful features have already been added, and project iteration gets much slower in big projects).

There are thousands of engineers working on facebook.com. If they all quietly left and were never replaced, how long do you think it would take before anyone in the public would notice? 6 months? 1 year? Longer?

And if thats the case, what a waste of that huge pool of talent. If you could leave your job without any of your users noticing or caring, what a waste of your education and your potential. Quit and start that company you've always been dreaming about starting. Go do literally anything of substance.

[1] https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/contributors/summary [2] https://www.openhub.net/p/chrome/analyses/latest/languages_s...