Hacker News Reader

I think it’s possible for two things to be true:

- monorepos are a good way to organise software, especially if there are many internal libraries or dependencies

- It is bad if your dependencies are always churning and breaking and disappearing underneath you

It sounds like the actual problem might be that there are too many dependencies or that they change more frequently. I think the OP was suggesting that the latter of these is the case.

View on HN

I would agree with this for the most part, but I'd also note that I think the case the author describes is uniquely bad and that probably necessitates some investigation. IDK, maybe their org doesn't follow the rules, or maybe the product they're responsible for doesn't have enough unit tests, so breakages can slip through, or maybe their (or my) bullshit radar is tuned badly and one of us is out of touch with how most people experience the churn.

(I should also mention that there are recognized issues with the cost of churn at Google, but this isn't really one of them)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com