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What's the biggest misconception you think many people have? (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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Ideally the answers aren't just political soapboxing.

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[–] 21 points 5 months ago* (5 children)

People think successful software is usually made by huge teams.

In actuality, most open source is just one or a couple of people building something they found useful and releasing it. Even corporate software is usually a small team. Sure some software has huge numbers of people working on it (google for example) but its not the norm. Your bank app, this site here, all very small teams.

I remember when bitcoin first started and I got into the idea of sending $$ with it. First couple of years had less than 100 people in total touch it. And 90% of it was a couple of people at most.

A bit of a tangent, but most software has NO plan if that person or people walk away from the project. Or just straight up die. We live in a somewhat golden era when software has only just started outliving its builders. But watch the next 20-40 years. It will be interesting times.

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  • [–] [S] 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I was surprised when I learned that. Same with the idea that adding more people to a software project doesn't make it go faster. To be clear, I am very ignorant on software stuff in general.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    Even open source projects with lots of contributors, most work is only done by a fairly small number generally. Have seen delegation before though, like "would be cool if you all make PRs for this" where it's a time consuming but essentially low programming high creative skill task.

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