i have, unfortunately, personally seen bigtech do waterfall on occasion. one of the last large projects i was on there, i joined after they'd spent quite literally six months on design with minimal implementation, followed by 3 months on unintegrated impl and unit testing with zero touchpoints with the rest of the codebase. i joined when they started running into massive constant issues connecting it to... anything, and had a hard deadline three months out. pretty quickly discovered the system latency was quite literally three orders of magnitude slower than anything that could potentially work, an insane amount of "defensive programming" memory copies / pass by value of massive nested data structures, and around three core concepts that were completely incompatible with the ways their users would actually use the system. we worked 60-80 hour weeks for those three months straight and ripped out a huge chunk of the original code and design to make anything at all work.

anyway that gave me a pretty deep distrust of any design doc that's seen more than 3 months of discussion without any real goddamn working code.

@hasen_95dx

Is waterfall a real thing? I've never seen it anywhere but I was told it existed by OOP advocates.

Apparently it's a thing where you spend six months doing nothing but doing system design, writing specs and flow charts and object diagrams.

And then you spend six months… https://t.co/PUiJb5fomn