Software Engineering at Google
Google is highly non-representative of businesses and technology businesses in particular.  It has a near monopoly on the search business and has enormous amounts of money from a single source -- advertising.<p>Google Fiscal Year 2015<p>Revenues: $74.54 Billion (source: Google)
Advertising Revenue: $67.39 Billion (source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;266249&#x2F;advertising-revenue-of-google&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;266249&#x2F;advertising-reven...</a>)
Profits: $23.4 Billion<p>Market Capitalization: $570 Billion<p>Google Not a Startup&#x2F;Has Not Been a Startup for Many Years<p>Founded: September 4, 1998  (19 years ago)
IPO: August 19, 2004 (13 years ago)<p>Number of Employees (2015): 57,100
Revenues per Employee: $1.3 Million
Profits per Employee: $409,000<p>The issue is that Google has so much money and is so successful that it can do all sorts of things that are extremely inefficient, even very harmful and still do fine, unlike smaller companies or startups in particular.<p>For example the arxiv article states:<p><i>2.11. Frequent rewrites</i><p><i>Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years.</i><p><i>This may seem incredibly costly. Indeed, it does consume a large fraction of Google’s resources.</i><p>Google has the money to do this.  As the article argues, it may work for Google.  On the other hand, Google has so much money and such a dominant market position, it probably can keep succeeding even if continual code rewriting is actively harmful to Google.<p>In orthodox software engineering <i>theory</i>, competent software engineers, let alone the best of the best that Google claims to hire, should write modular highly reusable code that does not need to be rewritten.<p>Many rewrites and &quot;refactorings&quot; are justified by claiming the &quot;legacy&quot; code is &quot;bad code&quot; that is not reusable and must be written by &quot;real software engineers&quot; to be reusable&#x2F;maintainable&#x2F;scalable etc.  One rewrite ought then to be enough.<p>Even highly successful businesses, for example $1 Billion dollars in revenues with $50 million in profits and 5000 employees (revenues per employee of $200,000), have nowhere near these vast resources --- either in total dollars or per employee or product unit shipped.  Blindly copying highly expensive software development processes from Google or other super-unicorn companies like Apple or Facebook is likely a prescription for failure.