If a social media platform is running smoothly, but the engineers leave, why can’t a platform continue to run on autopilot?

Question

I guess this is applicable to any social media platform or other similar systems. Is it because there are always bugs to address, so it’s never really running smoothly, or other reasons?

In: 153

Answer 1

So when the platform was first being created, the developers had to make a bunch of tradeoffs in order to meet deadlines and solve immediate issues. The price they paid was code that would create problems down the road and require additional workarounds. A lot of the code that is still in the codebase is this legacy code. The engineers know about these problems and can anticipate when they are going to become a real issue. Without the engineers, the platform can run okay for a little while, but the built-in problems will eventually compound and it will crash.