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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

> But is there a single individual on earth who knows all the ins and outs of all the minutiae of every single aspect of Google search

Would you go as far as to wager that the top 15 engineers/architects on the project (over the years) know about 85% of the ins and outs of the system? Generally speaking at least, edge cases excluded.

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I work on a video game that's approaching 20 years old. I don't think in our case that this distribution would hold, because for instance if you took our top engine programmer, he probably wouldn't know off-hand how to work with our texture pipeline. Nor our web store. Nor our customer support tools.

He'd probably be capable of figuring any of them out, but in terms of "knowledge at rest", I doubt anyone knows even a third of everything there is to know, even if we constrain ourselves only to knowledge of things within the engineering discipline.

World of Warcraft ?

Eve Online? If so the knowledge at rest is probably much less than 30%

As a SWE working on Google Search, I can tell you this is not the case for Google Search (Nobody understands anywhere close to 85% of it). The amount of different moving pieces is enormous, and most parts are constantly being changed. The best you can do is to have an understanding of which system is responsible for what, and delegating to someone who is an expert in that system when you need to dig into what it is doing.

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