Not Every Problem Needs a Sledgehammer

“I spoke to an engineer at one of our suppliers who said that in the last six months, he’s generated a million lines of code.”Michael Frendo, the CTO of New Relic, offered me that as evidence of acceleration, one data point among several. The counterweight came from the start of his own career, at Nortel in Ottawa: “Our telephone switch at the time had the largest code base in the world. It was the largest. It was 14 million lines of code, and it had 2,500 engineers working on it for decades. Now we talk about the engineer delivering a million lines of code in six months. Think about that…