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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

I think I managed about 10k users with my mac shareware games in 2009/10, and that didn't get me ramen profitability let alone modern pay scales.

So not necessarily any budget for more than they did.

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Single dev codebases have a really hard time growing to 400kloc though

Hmm. I've found that it's much easier and faster to write a lot of code than to take the time and be thoughtful of what you end up shipping.

> I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. Mark Twain [0]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21422-i-didn-t-have-time-to...

That’s true to an extend, but you need to work to make that much code.

Not necessarily — I've had the misfortune of working with someone who repeatedly, rather than subclass, duplicated the entire file.

Including the comments I'd added saying "TODO: de-duplicate this method".

That only got the project up to about 120 kloc before I'd had enough of that nonsense and left.

My understanding is that line count was mostly down to that one dev, as he didn't only ignore what I had to say when I was there, he also ignored the occasional contractor.

The point is that one cannot be confident that 10k users maps to "enough money to engineer this properly".

Oh, certainly, the 10k users can’t. That’s why I’m not talking about that. I’m saying that instead of looking at the number of users, just the fact they have a 400k lines codebase suggests that they must have enough money to hire a team that builds that (or had, at some point in the past).

Maybe so, but not necessarily. I have a couple of 300+kloc projects that I wrote all by my lonesome. It's far from an impossibility. On the other hand, there's a reason I only have a couple of those.

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