> However, then he said, "We overemphasise the parts of the system we've personally worked on, particularly those we've most recently worked on. We downplay other parts of the system, including the impact of dependencies (e.g. libraries)."
> Oh. Um, well, this is also not my experience.
> I work on software alone, and I do not have any dependencies.
If you work in a company of 100+ engineers with multiple specialties it's impossible to keep up with everything. At <50 engineers if you collaborate and/or switch teams it's possible to know almost everything, but that's the most I think the majority of us have the internal storage/RAM for.
I suspect your thresholds are far too high, and that some specialties are almost mutually incomprehensible, so rare for one person to properly understand what is going on.
Time is a real factor also. How long has this code base been accumulating...
Early on in the company I work we had a practice of collaborating across teams, sharing members etc. so a lot of us knew a lot of the code base from "different angles". If you implemented a backend feature you might write also write the terraform and the frontend that worked with it, with some input from the people experienced in those things. Kind of like random full-stack development? Slower than normal development at first but it makes future collaboration easier. It was quite great, but unsustainable as the amount of people grows.
edit: I think in general at the early stages of a company you hire a lot of people who are good at adapting and learning new skills since they might need to fill new roles quickly as new needs arise. So those people are good at this kind of full stack development since it's their niche. As you grow, you hire more specialized or junior people, and they can't do this process quickly enough for it to feel fluid anymore.
> Oh. Um, well, this is also not my experience.
> I work on software alone, and I do not have any dependencies.
If you work in a company of 100+ engineers with multiple specialties it's impossible to keep up with everything. At <50 engineers if you collaborate and/or switch teams it's possible to know almost everything, but that's the most I think the majority of us have the internal storage/RAM for.