from Patrick McKenzie | by Patrick McKenzie

This is *the* factor behind engineering staffing at scaled software firms not well understood outside of them.

“We need sufficient experts to model the world in arbitrarily high degrees of fidelity because *we are the operating system of it.* How many people does that imply? It implies *lots.*”

(Another thing less well understood is that many engineers are primarily hard disk space, memory, or bus bandwidth and not CPU. Google needs to know how to Google and Google cannot Google how to Google so that knowledge resides in the network structure between brains od Googlers)