Most consumer technology products are much more complicated under the hood than they appear to be to regular consumers.
Even most programmers -- who are well aware of the hidden complexity of the products they themselves work on -- usually seem to believe that this must not hold true for the products of other companies.
For every feature you're aware of on a random consumer tech product or service, there are probably ten or twenty more that don't concern you, that you haven't seen, or that you don't care about.
Don't forget the multiplier on how many more internal systems a company has vs its external ones. It's not uncommon at all to see thousands of engineers at a large company working on internal-only systems, covering the full gamut of every need of a large corporation. Hell, even just the facilities management systems for the office spaces are complicated.
I read somewhere (can't remember where) that Airbnb had a dedicated team of 13 engineers and designers working on the welcome email alone. Getting the CTA "just right" resulted in a huge difference in conversions.
That's a great point I always struggle with coming up with UIs for side projects, but really everything I come up with will always look cheap compared to the efforts of 13 experts.
I mean you could go work for them? McDonalds is highly optimized fast food but they have a quality issue. Breakfast and chicken nuggets are about the only thing they do well. Walmart is getting better with e-commerce and online groceries. I think that’s the future. If in were Bezos, I’d be worried about Walmart. Target needs to step up their game too especially around grocery delivery and pickup.
The question is could they have achieved the same with two people.
When I was contracting I was always surprised how outwardly similar businesses could have vastly different IT functions. Sometimes an order of magnitude larger for no apparent gain.
Even most programmers -- who are well aware of the hidden complexity of the products they themselves work on -- usually seem to believe that this must not hold true for the products of other companies.
For every feature you're aware of on a random consumer tech product or service, there are probably ten or twenty more that don't concern you, that you haven't seen, or that you don't care about.