

They Write the Right Stuff (1996) - ingve
https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

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msandford
There's absolutely nothing special about what they're able to achieve once you
look at the price. Many, many organizations could do just as well if they had
the budget.

$35mm/year to maintain 420kLOC.

If you assume that each person costs about $150k/year in terms of salary,
benefits, overhead, etc then you've got 233 salaries. In actuality they employ
260 people (from the article), so this math is pretty good.

What this boils down to is say 100 people writing code and 100 people
verifying it (and 60 managers, administrative, etc). That means ownership of
only 4kLOC per person. And that's maintaining, not writing from scratch. If
turnover on code is 10% per year (and that's probably high!) then that's 400
lines of code you have to write every year.

400 lines per year is 40 lines per month. Two lines per day. Coding by proof
at this kind of scale is actually practical, which is how they're able to
catch so many bugs. You can fuzz test it, you can discuss it with your
colleagues, you can agonize over the specific math you're supposed to be
doing. You can do all kinds of things that people who have to produce 10x or
100x the code don't have the luxury of doing.

Given the budget I would expect nothing less.

~~~
michaelochurch
_$35mm /year to maintain 420kLOC. [...] Given the budget I would expect
nothing less._

What's impressive isn't the LOC per dollar (or person), even at that level of
reliability, but the functionality (and reliability of functionality) per LOC.
It's what that 420 kLoC _does_. They've managed to get a lot of functionality
relative to code size... because they know the cost of excess code.

I wouldn't be surprised if most Silicon Valley companies have 420 kLoC after a
couple years, not a single line of it being something you'd want to bet your
life on. The difference is that 420 kLoC of "Agile" code written under
deadline culture (perpetual "sprinting") with stack-ranking is going to amount
to nothing but 3/4ths of a shitty product-- not because it isn't enough code,
but because the code is so unreliable.

As it were, there are _plenty_ of startups with $35M per year budgets (or
more) that aren't writing high-reliability code or anything even close to it.

~~~
msandford
> What's impressive isn't the LOC per dollar (or person), even at that level
> of reliability, but the functionality (and reliability of functionality) per
> LOC. It's what that 420 kLoC does. They've managed to get a lot of
> functionality relative to code size... because they know the cost of excess
> code.

I don't know that I agree that the code is particularly feature dense or
anything. It might be, or it might not. Just because it flys the shuttle
doesn't mean it's a miracle of efficiency. Hell, it might be really
inefficient for all we know. They might do clipboard inheritance all over the
place because that's easier than trying to accidentally not break a "general
purpose" function when making a particular change.

Also, they're not writing 420kLOC every year, they've slowly accumulated that
much code. The turnover I would suspect is 10% a year or less. Might only be
3% a year.

What I was trying to say is with that level of funding versus the amount of
features that they have to deliver (little/no interfaces, no database, no
scaling, no sharding, no data sanitization, etc) it's much, much easier to get
things right. This is basically firmware and the hardware is known so it's
much, much easier to get it right.

The web is so often broken because there are dozens of different standards by
different institutions that are adhered to in varying degrees by many
thousands of different projects running on a multitude of hardware. Getting
stuff so right for the space shuttle is impressive for sure, but look at the
kind of comparison you're making.

------
jameshart
The use of the present tense to refer to Shuttle launches is a bit odd at
first - it looks like this article actually dates from 1996. Was surprised to
find out that Fast Company was that old, but there you go - apparently they
launched November 1995.

------
dodders
Been posted many times before [1].

1\.
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=they%20write%20the%20right%20s...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=they%20write%20the%20right%20stuff&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

