However, the average tenure of a codebase in a big tech company is a lot longer than that. Many of the services I work on are a decade old or more, and have had many, many different owners over the years. That means many big tech engineers are constantly “figuring it out”. A pretty high percentage of code changes are made by “beginners”: people who have onboarded to the company, the codebase, or even the programming language in the past six months.
I think this is a good balanced piece on the trade offs companies make all the time. If I could add one more scenario it’s this: Your best engineer can either have more and more of their time eaten up by support ticket and onboarding and less and less time coding.
Thus it’s in their best interest to move somewhere new. And any engineer, no matter how seasoned has that experience of https://xkcd.com/1421/ “Note to self”.
Quote Citation: sean goedecke, “How good engineers write bad code at big companies”, November 29, 2025, https://www.seangoedecke.com/bad-code-at-big-companies/