most software development has exactly the same cost parameters; the difference is just that BigTech companies have so much money they are capable of paying thousands of engineers handsome salaries, to do the endless drudgery required to keep the tech stacks working
The payback is also very different at tech companies, or in any professional environment. I make something because I’m excited about it, and the payback is some combination of getting to use it and being glad other people can use it. When a company makes something, the payback is typically that people pay for it, or perhaps use it while looking at ads. This dramatically changes the incentives around adding features and generally changing it: you need to keep improving the product to compete with others that people might use instead. Once you need to keep the product live, in the sense that there are always multiple engineers spun up on it, the cost of switching to updated versions of dependencies is a small portion of the overall cost. And designing for minimal upkeep makes it harder to add new features.
The payback is also very different at tech companies, or in any professional environment. I make something because I’m excited about it, and the payback is some combination of getting to use it and being glad other people can use it. When a company makes something, the payback is typically that people pay for it, or perhaps use it while looking at ads. This dramatically changes the incentives around adding features and generally changing it: you need to keep improving the product to compete with others that people might use instead. Once you need to keep the product live, in the sense that there are always multiple engineers spun up on it, the cost of switching to updated versions of dependencies is a small portion of the overall cost. And designing for minimal upkeep makes it harder to add new features.