Is it just me or ...

Is it just me or do kids these days have a false sense of size and a false sense of what they need?  Maybe it's just me, but let me give you some examples.

• This developer came up to me and said that he was working on a huge project, it had over 20,000 lines of code.  When I was working for the WCB I had to recompile every single COBOL program that we had because we changed a copybook that was used in every single program.  I had to recompile 1850 programs with an average length of 20,000 lines of code and I had to do this in four separate environments, including production.  I recompiled approximately 150,000,000 lines of code.  Twenty thousand lines of code seems small by comparison.
• "I've got a huge database and I'm not sure that the database can handle something this size."  The database in question could fit on a single DVD - less than 4GB of data and contained no table with more than a million rows.  Compare this with a financial disbursement table that grew more than 10 million rows per year and had a history table that had grew by 20 million rows per year.
• "You guys need a bigger server.  My app requires four quad core processors."  A properly written application does not need four quad core processors.  I've been part of a system that had 1200 users, over 400 of which were considered "power users", serviced by two, dual 700MHz processor boxes.   Less processing power than a single web server we have today.  Considerably less and yet our applications push the current boxes to the limit for far fewer users!!!
• "My application has a huge user base:  200,000 people per year will access it."  So?  Let's say that people will access your application only on business days, and then, only between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM.  That leaves 100 people accessing your system every hour.  That's not a big application.  It my handle work for a lot of users, but it's not a big application, particularly on the hardware we're running.

OK, That being said, it may not be the kids fault.  He could just be repeating what he is being told.  He might never have experienced anything Enterprise-scale.  He might just be a rookie.  Let's give the kid the benefit of the doubt, educate him on what an enterprise scale actually consists of and then watch him go back to his desk, thankful that he's not working on one.