alt Hacker NewsThis is what I don't get about big companies and their software; you'd think every application, every moving part would have a (small?) team of core maintainers, people that get paid well to know everything there is to know about something, ranging from (in microsoft's case) Paint to a particular configuration panel.
I get that this doesn't scale though - a lot of features are just "done" at some point and keeping one or more people whose sole job is to maintain this may lead to them bolting on features just to stay relevant / stop being bored. But big tech can easily afford to keep people like that on.
(I mean they keep (kept?) tons of middle management on, who knows what they even do? Not emailing right now that's for sure am I right?)
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> every moving part would have a (small?) team of core maintainers, people that get paid well to know everything there is to know about something,
I work at a company with a few thousand employees in the Netherlands, and have been moved around a few teams in the last 7 years (not by choice, the team is nuked and I'm shuffled off elsewhere).
Technically, the product is supposed to have a "handover" to another team who can do the maintenance. What happens in practice is the person who worked on it gets saddled with maintaining it forever along with taking up the responsibilities of the newer work that comes along their way.
I've accumulated a string of such projects, including one that's used extensively by a few large companies, and the only person maintaining it is drumroll ... me, in whatever time I can spare for it.
Companies just don't want to compensate people to hang around and maintain a system, they want a consistent output of widgets that can be measured. Somehow our work culture is still stuck in factory worker mentality despite being well into the information revolution now.