Gregory's Server
I even made a presentation in Beijing at a software development conference, "The Elephant in the Room" about this problem.
At that time (~2014), Twitter had a 1000 IT staff, Google ~20,000 and I asked WHY? and What are all these people doing?
"Now, everyone say after me; I AM TOO STUPID TO WRITE SOFTWARE"
@niclas As someone who has worked in similar companies, I can confirm that ~30-40% of the engineering time can still be accurately captured by this XKCD https://xkcd.com/303/ - but now rather than "compiling" you have "the pipeline is running/breaking/waiting for approvals/waiting for another team to deploy a new version of a service we depend on", or "I'm trying to configure the environment so my laptop can run a whole Kubernetes production cluster and keep me warm when it's cold outside".
That's one of the reasons why I've argued that an IT company should never have >1000 employees, or process overhead, loss of product focus, dilution of talent caused by an imbalance between business school folks and engineering folks, and org chart decay through excessive layering will just make it dysfunctional by design.
@niclas As someone who has worked in similar companies, I can confirm that ~30-40% of the engineering time can still be accurately captured by this XKCD https://xkcd.com/303/ - but now rather than "compiling" you have "the pipeline is running/breaking/waiting for approvals/waiting for another team to deploy a new version of a service we depend on", or "I'm trying to configure the environment so my laptop can run a whole Kubernetes production cluster and keep me warm when it's cold outside".