Large-scale enterprises are really something to behold. Take one small example. A certain large company has cafeterias in many locations. Each of these cafeterias is like a small enterprise. And it has nothing to do with the core business itself. To order food, you need an app. Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well. There's also a payment component and everything that comes along with that.

The cafeteria itself is a large scale enterprise, wholly enclosed inside the larger scale enterprise.

It's all true but the cafeteria is generally outsourced. Those employees are not on the books of the real enterprise and the software shared between all of the outsourcers customers. Same goes for many non-core functions.

I can confirm for a certain very large enterprise that this is not the case. The employees ARE on the books of the company and considered full time employees with full benefits, and the software is custom built for this enterprise, by this enterprise, and not shared with any other enterprises

Apple being Apple

Yeah, like I don't think ARA could build a mobile app for ordering at a cafeteria, period.

I feel better working at a company when the support staff are also working for the same company.

Good, they want you not asking a single question, your paycheck obviously requires it.

Exactly

I would not have wasted my time and yours if Bon Appetit was running it.

“I was a second reloader’s mate on a ship that guarded a ship that made ice cream for the other ships.”

What is this from?

I can't find that exact quote, but the US navy had barges (made of concrete!) that made ice cream in World War 2, and those barges were unarmed so needed guarding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge

Truly the US military is a logistics organisation which dabbles in warfare.

Historically and generally true. Which makes it a fascinating lesson to witness the major logistics issues happening today. Shows how even an institution like the U.S. Navy can be badly mismanaged by just a handful of the wrong people at the top. When's the next shareholder meeting? Surely there's a way to fire the CEO at this point.

Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well.

...and these days, someone has to justify their continued employment, hence guaranteeing that said app and its related systems will be subjected to constant trendchasing and the inevitable resultant enshittification. It's otherwise perfectly possible to create such an ordering system that will keep working with next to no attention, which is why the most stable and reliable systems I've worked with were created by someone who didn't want to have to work on it more than once.

> A certain large company

Which one is it? And, more importantly, why not name it?

I know of a large company that does not like to be named https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Caff%C3%A8_Macs