the gratitude thing is kinda fun. I imagine that managers treat that as a "positive only" indicator (lack of gratitude markers should not be counted as a negative, but a lot of them should be counted as a positive), since it's dependent on coworkers who do that kind of thing.

In a previous job I would always offer "e-bux" for fixes. I was half tempted to write a quick backend to track these e-bux, but gamifying that sort of stuff has its own consequences as well...

> If there is an issue with a single deploy, it stops the whole company from shipping changes.

This definitely feels odd to me. Monorepo shouldn't mean mono-artifact! Perhaps this is more theoretical/one point, but if Stripe engineers feel this and this person felt this after less than a year... Bazel is nice y'all. (EDIT: I'm being too harsh here, CD in particular probably makes the calculus on rollouts very tricky)