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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that you're both right.

Putting up a simple web site that does something basic, that you then walk away from is easy, and is what a lot of people who call themselves web developers do.

Building something like Gmail or Facebook OTOH are endeavors only slightly below the moon landing in complexity and “solving cool problems”.

And it is equally legitimately "web development"...

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I would imagine some of the problems people have with web developers is this inflated sense of ... something. Comparing GMail with the moon landing is hilariously out of touch. If you hear these sorts of statements enough times it's easy to associate most web developers with delusions of grandeur.

I am not sure I would class either of Gmail or Facebook with the Apollo Program in terms of headcount (est. 400k), total cost (estimates from $100-200 Bn), complexity (hundreds of contractors, millions of moving parts, dozens of directly-operated sites, thousands of projects), or novelty (landing on the fricking moon).

If rockets were built like software ... (insert joke)

400k - wow that puts things to scale. This sort of comparison really should have been in my schooling textbooks.

Well, I did say they were smaller projects :)

But you're of course right that I exaggerated a bit for effect. I do that sometimes.

My point still stands if you slice a few orders of magnitude off my hyperbole.

I don't disagree that Google and Facebook do enormous amounts of difficult engineering (I recently saw a USAF slide which compared Google's R&D spending on software to the entire defence industry's).

But the Apollo program and the Manhattan project were something else. Arguably they represent the historical highwater marks in terms of megaprojects which had effectively unlimited resources in the face of wide-open, unsolved problems.

I think Google's total cost is more than $100-200 billion. It's a bit hard to pin down what "total cost" means in this context, though. But their 2017 operating expenses were $82 billion. Each year is higher than the last, but if you add up the last four years, they're over $250 billion.

Facebook is about an order of magnitude less, so the Apollo program fits nicely between them.

> It's a bit hard to pin down what "total cost" means in this context, though.

I realise looking back that comparing a company to a project/program isn't really correct. One kind ends, the other tries very hard not to end.

Can you explain what you mean when you compare Gmail and Facebook to the moon landing? On its face that comment looks way out of whack to someone who is outside the tech industry.

Obviously software was totally different back then, and Apollo 11 was much more than a software project, but FWIW the Apollo guidance computer software was 130416 lines of assembly[1][2], while Facebook is probably at least 100 million lines of code at this point[3]. Also note that Facebook uses languages that are much more expressive than assembly, so "1000x as much code" probably indicates much more than 1000x as much logic being expressed. The reason Facebook and Gmail seem relatively simple is because they're designed to feel simple so they can be used by regular people, but the full implementation details are very, very complex.

[1] https://qz.com/726338/the-code-that-took-america-to-the-moon...

[2] https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11

[3] https://www.quora.com/How-many-lines-of-code-is-Facebook

while Facebook is probably at least 100 million lines of code at this point

...which, if I were to guess, consists of a significant amount of "do nothing" or otherwise useless abstractions that either were put there dogmatically or once served a purpose but no longer does. This is reasonably prevalent in Enterprise software but I imagine the much higher churn in Facebook code also increases the amount of cruft that gets thrown in or otherwise left behind.

Search HN or the Internet in general for mentions of Facebook's app being bloated and you'll find that even non-technical users are at least somewhat surprised by this gross inefficiency.

Excepting the moon landing comparison which has already been thoroughly decried, this post is spot on. The phenomenon really shows the importance of connotations, associations, and learning to present yourself effectively.

My personal experience has been that the label "web developer" is typically used by less experienced people if only because after a little while in the industry, even if your focus is primarily web-related, you start to develop skills that are more widely applicable and don't want to be "pigeonholed". It doesn't have anything to do with the difficulty of the problem set, the quality of the ecosystem, or any other specific value judgment.

It's the difference between a package delivery service characterizing their employees as "box movers" v. "logistics coordinators".

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