Sure you can build and maintain a Twitter clone with 10 devs, but when you’ve got hundreds of millions of users you have to have several dev teams working on it. You have a resposnability to patch the hundreds of issues that come and to “develop” (read: enshittify and bloat) your platform.
Lemmy is a reddit-lookalike (although much better IMO) but it has so few users and bloated features compared to average projects that I think 10 full-time salaried devs would be more than enough, but reddit proper has hundreds of employees.
Also these are the kind of people who think they can be cheap and hire a handful of “10 x full-stack devs”, pay them as much as an average programmer to save money, and then post the classic “nobody wants to work anymore” shit when they either can’t find them due to shit compensation or they quit from stress due to being understaffed and underpaid.
My boss does this for “estimating” software project schedules. He built a goddamned spreadsheet* where he will rate the entire project on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being trivial/quick-win territory, and 5 being extremely labor-intensive.
Two problems with this approach as used at my job:
He assigns the ratings before requirements gathering has even started (if they ever get documented in the first place).
He bases the final deadline around the calculator spreadsheet, and sends that date on to the business partners/project stakeholders within the company, and they usually pass it along to upper management.
So, by the time we finally get requirements together and find out, oh, shit, this is actually way more complicated than a 2.71828 or whatever, the stakeholders have already told the Senior VPs of Thought Leadering that my team will be done by a specific date. The week before that date rolls around, boss goes into a panic, demands that I work on absolutely nothing else as I’m being pinged daily to put out random bullshit fires on other projects that were rushed through implementation before I even worked here. Between that and the low pay, I start really strongly considering pulling a no-show. I stay up late a couple of nights, project gets finished. Rinse. Repeat.
I envy the dead.
*: No, it’s not a Monte Carlo simulation or anything that fancy – he just multiplies the complexity rating by a set number of labor hours, and doesn’t bake in additional time for risk mitigation. They promoted his ass because this is so scientific and data-driven. Edit: and no, there isn’t a more detailed breakdown/implementation milestone schedule somewhere further down in the estimate. It’s literally “I feel like this is a… 2. You have a week. GIT 'ER DUN!”
Big Yud is literally the founder of an assigning-random-values-based-on-gut-feelings religion. His essay on Bayesian reasoning has given perhaps thousands of blog-reading nerds irreversible brain damage.
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