I wholeheartedly believe that they could not have fixed it with 9,600 people months of work. They haven’t been able to fix it with many multiples of that.
You're assuming performance has been the core priority, or even a priority at all, and I think this is a bad assumption to make. I would estimate a much smaller number of people-months of work if I were you.
Dev users assume the only problem a product can solve is performance, when there is a lot more than that in reality.
The first step in fixing something is being aware that it needs to be fixed.
They need to just clean slate start from skratch. I don't believe that code base can be saved. AI means it's easy to copy any SAAS now right? so should be easy /s
> They haven’t been able to fix it with many multiples of that.
which may actually be the problem. I suspect that there is actually some ideal ratio that could be calculated of Input Fields / Dev, LoC / Devs, or maybe Unique Pages / Dev, or some mix of all of the above. Some of the metrics I hear out of places like airbnb absolutely blow my mind (>5000 engineers! wtaf are they all doing?!?). I can sort of see the #s at google, MS making sense given the breadth of the problems they are solving, but other places, not so much.