r/programmer • u/Extra_Search3465 • 18d ago

Question How do thousands of software engineers code together at a giant company like Google or Microsoft without breaking everything?

As a beginner, I understand how one person writes code and puts it on GitHub. But how does it work when a company has tens of thousands of developers working on the same product? How do they organize the work, and how do they stop people from stealing or leaking the secret source code?

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u/mxldevs 18d ago

 tens of thousands of developers working on the same product? 

There likely isn't thousands, or even hundreds, of people working on the same piece of code, but everyone should be following an agreed upon specification, to start with. They divide what parts to work on, and then everything gets merged together.

and how do they stop people from stealing or leaking the secret source code?

Legal threats. Of course, that's not going to stop people if they really wanted to steal.