ME:: technical leaders and a few support people know how to figure out how a product works, everybody else knows their small part ; Sean Goedecke:: Nobody knows how large software products work
Discovered: Oct 2, 2026 15:41 (UTC) ME:: technical leaders and a few support people know how to figure out how a product works, everybody else knows their small part ; Sean Goedecke:: Nobody knows how large software products work
QUOTE
- Read the whole thing: Sean Goedecke:: Nobody knows how large software products work
Large, rapidly-moving tech companies are constantly operating in the “fog of war” about their own systems. Simple questions like “can users of type Y access feature X?”, “what happens when you perform action Z in this situation?”, or even “how many different plans do we offer” often can only be answered by a handful of people in the organization. Sometimes there are zero people at the organization who can answer them, and somebody has to be tasked with digging in like a researcher to figure it out.
How can this be? Shouldn’t the engineers who built the software know what it does? Aren’t these answers documented internally? Better yet, aren’t these questions trivially answerable by looking at the public-facing documentation for end users? Tech companies are full of well-paid people who know what they’re doing1. Why aren’t those people able to get clear on what their own product does?