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Comment by wcdolphin | Hacker News Reader

No. The worst case is that the engineering team spent more time working on “well encapsulated projects” than on the most important project for their business and are all now out of jobs. Most companies don’t fail because of tech debt. And certainly not because of version control tech debt.

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Exactly. Whenever I see an engineer take a hardline position (eg: "no monorepos you zealots!") I always ask myself: is this person just annoyed?

Most of the time they're just annoyed.

One side effect of every successful business are annoyed worker ants that are sick of dealing with growth problems. I've been there. I know how annoying it can be.

Personally I've found comfort in embracing the chaos and learning to manage it responsibly. No dogma. No absolutes. Know how to do monorepos well. Know how to do polyrepos well. Learn the pitfalls of both. Don't assume other people are stupid zealots.

I agree. Any article (like the linked one) that states one side of a case as an absolute without giving any exceptions or caveats is going to be greeted by me with scepticism. Particularly as he keeps mentioning 3 large engineering organisations that disagree with him.

Not exactly. (At least small) companies can go out of business because of bugs. And one great way to "achieve" said bugs are implicit dependencies hidden from developers that didn't introduce them.

> The worst case is that the engineering team spent more time working on “well encapsulated projects” than on the most important project for their business

I'm not really sure how I should read this. Don't you use your repos to solve business problems? Why should that change because of the repo layout?

If you do a poly-repo approach from the start, and have dependencies between repos, you need to introduce component versioning from the start. Component versioning doesn't solve any business problems, but requires engineering effort.

Small businesses are not going to go out of business because of bugs unless those bugs aren't addressed. They'll go out of business because of poor sales and product management. Different things.

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