“At companies with huge engineering forces, abstraction management is what a lot of them spend their time on. Often, these engineers are actually the most “productive” in terms of money saved – infrastructure projects tend to result in 8-9 figure savings or unique capabilities, and performance engineering (another form of abstraction alignment) frequently has 8 figure returns per engineer. Another large group of engineers is in charge of making sure that the old abstractions don’t break and crash the entire system.
Conversely, this is where startups can develop technical advantages on big tech despite having much smaller engineering teams, and where bootstrapped companies can out-engineer series-D companies. Given the freedom to align your abstractions to your goals, amazing things are possible.”