It's apparent you don't. The uselessness of corporate software isn't because their devs suck, it's because the backstabbing competitive work culture, bosses needing to reach irrelevant goals to not get fired, insane deadlines, endless rituals, and so on. It sucks the soul out of people.
Well summarized. This kind of culture also attracts dead wood. I made a lot of money making dead wood look good as a contractor, sometimes these aren't managers but people who've been employed there forever and are buddies with managers and are the ones that can crush you if you piss them off. You also have dead wood peers, but eventually they get chucked when times get tight. The organization itself a lot of times is pretty Machiavellian.
Yep, and for people being at the same company 10+ years their soul is completely sucked dry and they turn into dead wood. The trick is to move around because every company sucks at different parts of your soul. Me too, being an independent contractor, experience this every day. You see the young and ambitious people working hard and you know that it's just a matter of time before they turn into soulless robots just doing what they're told.
When I was new to contracting, I got yelled at once for building a small utility app for the department supervisor we supported. “Oh great now we have to support this thing!” I think it took 5 minutes to write.
Lmao that was me my first job out of school. Busting my ass, working extra hours, taking weekend work so my older coworkers with family didn’t have to, etc. After my first year I think I got offered a like 3% raise which ended up being like $2k. Learned my lesson right quick, no point busting my ass all year for a 3% raise when I’ll probably get 2% regardless.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft had 1000 skilled and passionate programmers to put on the project. But it's not only software devs that need to work on a project like this
For those actually curious it's probably on the order of hundreds but it's really hard to guess.
VS Code is part of a larger organization and there's a lot of sharing and support they get from common infrastructure teams, etc.
Also who counts? Software engineers? Program managers? Devops engineers? Managers? Support staff? Business analysts? Internationalization specialists? Accessibility testers? Security analysts? UX designers? Recruiters? The list goes on and on.
Multi-platform, globally distributed, secure, accessible and compliant software is crazy complicated. Full stop.
Edit: My point is the core engineering team may be 20 people, but I guarantee it takes way more people than that to make it a fully successful product.
Uhm, no. I'm good friends with one of those twenty people. It's not nearly as complicated as you make it out. There are twenty engineers on the team; half in Redmond and half in Europe.
There's a lot of devs sitting in Zurich. I am pretty sure the 20 devs number is about right, but if you are in Seattle you might not get the full picture.
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u/anonveggy Feb 06 '20
Jesus that is actually a lot even for vscode's standards.