Did You Know

One of the greatest organizational challenges today is to effectively, design, develop, and implement a new computer system. It’s very true — building a computer system is almost as much an art as it is a science.

• The average contract programmer charges over $100 per hour.
• A good consultant in the technology field can charge over $250 per hour.
• In 1983, the Federal Aviation Administration set out to develop a new air traffic control system. It still isn #146;t finished yet.
• Microsoft’s "old" Windows ’95 operating system is 11,236,344 lines of code.
• Microsoft spent 9,234,455 hours in developing Windows ’95 — that’s 49 minutes per line of code.
• Microsoft spent 2,333,345 hours in testing Windows ’95 — that’s 12.5 minutes per line of code.
• Microsoft programmers consumed ______??______ pizzas while writing Windows ’95 — that’s one slice of pizza for every __??__ lines of code.

Microsoft programmer consumed 126,237 pizzas while writing Windows ’95 — that’s one slice of pizza for every 9 lines of code.

How many pizzas Microsoft programmers consumed is interesting but not that useful. What you should focus on is the size of an operating system (over 11 million lines for Windows  #146;95) and how long it takes to write that many lines (almost 10 million hours for Windows ’95).