[iLoveOncall]

As always with large companies, what you see as a consumer is only the tip of the iceberg. For every user-facing line of code you have a hundred or a thousand lines of code made internal-only services, for interacting with partners, for variations due to local restrictions, etc.

[wpietri]

Sure. I mean I have some questions about your proportions, but let that pass. We clearly agree that the amount of total code is proportional to the user-facing stuff. Which for Lyft seems to be quite stable. And since the main function of developers is to improve things, that makes me wonder.

I also suspect that with larger companies, a lot of that below-the-waterline code is not ultimately necessary, the kind of stuff that if they were running a tight ship wouldn't be there. I certainly get reports like that from friends, anyhow. But it sounds like that's ultimately not an engineering problem but a management problem.