Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Highlight

Dewitt Clinton, a product manager at Google, explains the problem as such: If you have a billion users, and a mere 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you’d spend 19 person-years handling support issues every day. If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you’d need 20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up.