[csande17]

From my limited experience in Big Tech, these kinds of companies are pretty good at running data centers from the hardware, networking, and low-level OS management perspectives. But their server-side programming/"backend engineering" suffers from a lot of the same problems as their mobile app development. In fact, it's frequently way worse because you can't say anything like "what if someone wants to download our app over a 3G data connection" to get people to cut down on bloat.

Overstaffing and ship-the-org-chart syndrome leads to ginormous app bundles on the client and 7000 microservices on the server.

[ilyt]

It does look like many of the "hey, look at what cool things we do in our datacenter level infrastructure" stems from the stuff they run on that being overly complicated.