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When I started at Google the tooling was not very good, and monorepo was pretty painful. They used perforce, and it simply couldn't keep up. Commits could take minutes. Code review was also unbearably slow. Blaze didn't exist yet; just before I started they had tools that generated million+ line makefiles that everyone hated. So yeah, you need good tooling, but even Google didn't have it for the first ~10 years of its existence.

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I went to graduate school with a guy who ended up on Google's infrastructure team. He'd previously worked as head or lead dev for subversion (a little hazy on the details).

We worked on a small project where we put together statistical measures for codebases. It was a lot of fun, even if the infrastructure was out of my wheelhouse at the time.

Folks that can manage billion-line codebases are on a whole different level I think. I wonder sometimes how many folks like that there are.

EDIT: Looks like he left for a bit and is now back. Good on him!

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