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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

It would be really interesting to compare internal tools across both the biggest tech companies and various startups.

(All of it is kind of depressing when one's comparison is non-tech companies, though.)

I'd add that most technical companies today, unless at the scale of Google/Facebook do not necessarily (and most likely don't) have very sophisticated tooling in place. You can imagine Jenkins is always in place and codes are splitted into "self-contained" repos; I don't know if Google/Facebook uses Jenkins, but I know Netflix certainly does.

I haven't heard much about Microsoft or Amazon, though I do know from a friend working at Apple their toolings are not always consistent from team to team. I would appreciate if we have someone from these other big tech companies to discuss their development workflow.

As a SRE/DevOps, I love working on internal toolings because I get to feel like creating my own programming language - I can be creative but focus on solving problems in my domains.

> I don't know if Google uses Jenkins

Yes, Google runs hosted Jenkins internally.

[Video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJXmGGu1kf8

[Slides] https://www.cloudbees.com/sites/default/files/2016-jenkins-w...

With the caveat that Jenkins is not the main form of CI at Google -- that spot goes to TAP.

Why would it be interesting?

Startups don't need most of the things that big companies use. Trying to use them before you need them seems like an absurd waste of time.

Big, non-tech companies use completely crap tools in a lot of cases, compared to even 50 person startups. Google's a clear outlier in terms of tool quality, even for a tech giant, but I've seen some great in-house or newer tools used by a lot of startups, too. There are often huge differences in tool quality vs. task for companies of the same size/stage, too.

I respect that opinion, but it's different from my experience. My experience is that non-tech companies just don't care (i.e., we can do what we want), and that startups spend way too much time worrying about the tools they will need when they get as big as google. Instead of, you know, getting as big as google.

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