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Comment by syspec | Hacker News Reader

The fact that Canva has a `Source Control team` with at least 5 people on it (going by the thanks at the bottom of the article), means they should probably try a different approach.

I think it's a cool company, with a good product, but they're WAY too small to be having a "source control team" on staff. That's at least 1.2MM a year salary / benefits cost.

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It's not exactly a great name for the team but it gets across the point - we handle developer experience from the point you want to push your code to when you merge it, so we also work on communicating with CI/CD, code review/ownership tooling, gitops bots etc. Git Performance is a big issue right now but there's no end in sight to all the other scaling problems we could work on so if it stops making sense, we can work on something else :)

disclaimer: canva staff working on (for now) source control

I am curious why git modules couldn't be used here, and perhaps scripted to match particular workflows.

That's fair, and I think you're doing great work. I enjoyed the article

Author here, not everyone on the team works on git and git performance. Our team work on a variety of things that touch "code" in general like our ownership system and tooling, access control, bots and automation, etc...

Sorry, there is a quote from the article: "Kudos to other members of the Source Control team — Alex Sadleir, Wesley Li, Adam Murray, Matthew Chhoeu — who work on improving git performance at Canva"

So I assume 5 people working specifically on Git performance ;-P

Heh, I can see how this can be misinterpreted :P

That's the entire Source Control team (of 5 people) today. Among other things, they work on improving Git performance ;)

Thanks for the clarification. How many people work on Developer Productivity in total and what is the percentage from the total engineering headcount?

They have “hundreds of developers.” It seems completely reasonable for them to have a team focused on DX. It’s one of my most common recommendations for rapidly-growing companies, which are often focused on features at the expense of productivity. A DX team is one of the lowest-hanging fruits for fixing the problems that causes.

(Improved testing practices is often second, but that’s not a low-hanging fruit. It’s a big, juicy fruit that’s waaaaay up in the canopy. And then comes joint product decision-making within the team, which may as well be on another planet entirely.)

Canva is worth around $40 billion, it's not really a small company

Yeah... also once such a team exists, they are naturally going to resist ideas like not having a monorepo but just using git submodules, not keeping the history of every generated file forever etc.

Because then they won't need a 5-man team to handle the fallout any more.

That bit surprised me also. I don't have much experience with companies of this size so I have no real idea; how many people would you expect to work on source control at a company of this size? I had a look at Linkedin, they have 4,345 employees.

Usually it is considered good proportion to start with to be 10% to work on a Developer Productivity and it should increase to 15% as company grow. But regarding source control it really depends on the approach: if you are on polyrepo - then 0 is enough. If you decide to write you own source control system like Facebook or Google, then maybe couple of hundred engineers full time until the project is finished :)

Really weird. But maybe this team is in a country where developers cost 100x less? (: Still weird though.

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