UH...I FERGOT...WHAT'S THAT NUMBER AGAIN?

This is a thought of mine left over from the last decade of the 20th century.  Here's a hint:

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><b>TEN YEARS AND COUNTING...</b></span></td></tr>
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Let me translate this for you.  See?  That was easy, right?  Let me tell you that what you see above is the easy stuff.  There's worse, a lot worse than this.   But I digress. 

For many years I worked in companies that are what we called at the time, "high tech" companies.  That meant that they hired a lot of computer programmers to do a lot of very esoteric things.  The eleven lines of code that you see above are actually next to nothing of what has to be composed in order to get a computer to do anything.  In fact the number of lines of code for some of the programs that we take for granted run into the hundreds of thousands, if not more.  The volume of items that have to be considered in order for a computer program to function properly is staggering.  I dare say that for someone like me, it is simply too overwhelming to comprehend.  Since I was a human resources professional who had to recruit programmers, I had to learn some of the jargon, but that's as far as I got.  It is simply too astounding for me to imagine 25 people working on the same program all at once.  Yes, I said 25.  That's like saying that 25 people are going to write a book, and the outcome will be nearly perfect.  Excuse me!  How do you keep track of these people?  Do you expect that they are all going to think the same?  Do you expect that one or two of them might be in the habit of saying "port" instead of "left" and screw something up?  To continue along the same metaphor, what if the guy down the hall used "ass-end" for "stern" and the guy across from him uses "front" for "prow?"  Aren't we in deep stercus?
This is not an idle question.  When you decide to control a drone from California to assassinate Boodro Bullwinkle over in some far away "...stan", you don't seem to give yourself any room for regional or emotional differences.  Yet, we can do it.  
Those of us who are not long distance assassins, fire up our computer, go to Facebook and paper our wall and think that we are hot shots.  No way.  All the hard work has been done.  When I think of these thoughts, I really have to marvel at the world that we live in.  While it is true that spare parts for humans is the one area of endeavor that gets me in the profoundest part of my being, the control over technology gets my attention every day.  It sometimes gets it by attacking my patience, but mostly things run smoothly.  That, in and of itself, is also quite a situation for a guy who hits all the red lights on every given day!  So if any of you have a few million lines of code to write, don't come to me.  5 or 6 hundred words a day is about all I can handle.  Yeah, of course, I do it all by myself.  I screw up my own stuff.  I don't need any help in that area.