Comment by nevir

4 days ago

Have any companies mastered high craft at scale (like 1000s of engineers)?

In the classic "the mythical man month", Brooks describes 5000 man years effort in delivering OS/360.

I think by any measure that OS/360 would be "high craft".

Consistently, at scale, and in a durable way: I doubt it. However, I have seen many localized cases of extreme excellence in the places where the company knows it really matters.