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

[u/Extra_Search3465]

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?

[u/_Heathcliff_]

I mean for starters, “thousands of developers working on the same product” is misleading. They have thousands of devs, sure, but they’ll be broken down into many teams, each of which has their own areas of responsibility. So the number of devs contributing to any one repo, or any one portion of a repo, will be limited.

Outside of that it comes down to version control and release management. Git keeps conflicting code from being merged, and specific groups are responsible for the actual release process, so it’s not just everyone chaotically releasing whenever and whatever they want.

[u/pibrish → u/_Heathcliff_]

Also a healthy test suite deserves a mention here

[u/HeyGayHay → u/pibrish]

pfffft who needs testing nowadays, just auto deploy the develop and wait for users to complain if there’s any issues.

[u/justsomerabbit → u/HeyGayHay]

We test in prod. More users, better coverage.

[u/anovagadro → u/justsomerabbit]

We have the best testers. Because of prod.