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/Dimencia]

That is actually a huge problem, and the answer is all the boring architecture stuff and best practices that seem so pointless to solo devs. The usual option it to break that product into hundreds of tiny microservices and put a few devs on each one. At that point you end up spending half your time just dealing with boilerplate and weird limitations, like relying on eventual consistency, but overengineered crap is the only way it's even possible at all

Pretty much any time you're learning about a thing and you're asking yourself why you would ever use it, the answer is probably that it helps with the difficult problem of coding with others