Yet the same corporate will eat anything that Google or MSFT does while we all know they kill projects just like anyone else or like any smaller company going out.

Hour-long meetings about whether the copy should read "data center," "datacenter," "data-center," or whether it is really even correct to say any of these at all. And then negotiating with the design folks to fit in the extra character. Only to throw it all away because nobody thought about the fact that it has to support 5 different languages.

I wish I was kidding. Used to work at a place that did crap like that, pulling in developers for these time sucks because "only they really know the correct technical usage for our industry."

I work at similar size company. Basically they are like most companies building out the next 5 years while also keeping the lights on at four nines. There can be a lot of depth to product that you dont see. Anyone who says "why you need X people" often havn't tried a side hussle where you see 360 all the activities involved.

Building at scale without racking up big bill and hitting SLAs require a decent amount of effort.

At some point, most of your engineering time is spent on trying to understand what the previous team did. There's probably some engineer at Zendesk banging his head on the table because his boss wouldn't let him fix the sequential ticket IDs when he found them two months ago.

I work in one of the biggest companies of the world (employee and revenue wise) and it's basically a run-off reaction of well-articulated desk employees jerking each other off that, telling each other that they are so very important.

And the common management approach to anything not working immediately is "throw another 1.000 employees into the project" and the middle-managers measure their success by how many employees they are managing so it's a train without breaks. Hope it goes bankrupt soon.

Just re-watch Office Space..

Big companies are places where you get kudos for only taking two weeks to solve a problem you’ve solved elsewhere in two days. To an extent it’s Little’s Law. The latency requires more “CPUs” to handle the traffic.

Every single click in ServiceNow takes a full 2 seconds to do anything. For a ticketing system. Insane.

What’s more insane is that it is still better than the vast majority of ticketing software. I don’t know what it is about ticketing and Helpdesk that it ALwAYs ends up like that.

What's interesting is that Frank Slootman touts this transformation as a huge success in his book and talks at length about his conflict with Fred Luddy (who originally authored the simple ticketing incarnation of the ServiceNow monsterblob). The focus on keeping things simple is highlighted as an example of nerds' nearsighted thinking.

Never said that, but a competent engineer should be able to build like 75% of the main functionality of Zendesk over a weekend.

Now, I understand there's probably a lot more to it which is why I would expect it to be a company of around 50 engineers and 150 business/marketing/etc and that's being generous.

The hill I'd die on is that, with money not being a scarce resource and a technically feasible challenge present, a team of 200 should be able to build and sustain almost anything in the world. And that's being even generous. I think realistically a team of 50 should be able to build almost anything

Software developers being surprised that software companies need to do a lot more than just write code is kind of like sailors being surprised that global logistics involves a lot more than handling a ship.

Tarpit?