> feel free to doubt.

I don't doubt you at all.

I once worked on a project that was a new sign-up process for a large retailer (~90k employees at the time, four figures worth of outlets, quite a few billions in turnover).

There were about 60 people across, I can't even remember, maybe 10 teams that I knew about. One of the managers there assured me that the true participant figure was closer to 160. I was agog.

This project took months, and it had been going for months before I joined. And, as you can imagine, with that many people involved over that sort of timescale, there was turnover: people, sometimes key people, would leave and be replaced - sometimes by others who'd already worked on the project, but sometimes by new people - with the expected disruption that causes.

It was two web pages, plus some back end plumbing across multiple systems.

But, in the grand scheme of things, nothing that complex. I reckon it was a handful of thousands lines of code total across the full stack. I was mostly on the database side and, IIRC, I wrote a few hundred lines of SQL in a couple of stored procedures (wouldn't have been my preferred solution building from scracth but, you know, we weren't, and we had to integrate with a legacy systems that had to keep working as expected).

Overall it took 8 or 9 months from kick off to shipping and I was involved for perhaps 3 months of that towards the end. I was on the call with dozens of other people whilst me and one of the other guys hooked the final pieces together and tested it end to end for the first time... and it worked. There was actual cheering.

Large enterprises are genuinely ridiculous.