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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

Google dev tools serve Google scale needs. Not only your 2 people startup has no need for these, but they introduce friction that might kill your company.

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Not just google scale needs, but google-specific needs, regardless of scale. Having your entire company in a monorepo is something that Google went all in on and makes work, but it’s arguably not really necessary, even at Google scale.

There’s simply no reason not to do it given good tooling.

There are many reasons not to do it. One example is the compartmentalization of confidential, sensitive, or secret business logic and programs.

nope, that's completely incorrect, google does "compartmentalization of confidential, sensitive, or secret business logic and programs" in the monorepo. it's also massively increased how often it does and expanded how it works as management trusts employees less and less and less over time.

You missed the part where I said with good tooling. Nothing about a monorepo requires you to have all of the repo accessible to everyone.

I used to work on a code search tool. I have not had access to a dedicated code search tool in any of my ~5 roles since then and have not missed it.

It is the speed of iteration so testing, ci/cd, and monitoring are necessary after the MVP.

If you really care about speed of iteration, connect REPL to a running process and develop with it. Enterprise development practices are not about speed

At Google they absolutely are about speed - they're trying to help you go as fast as possible without breaking users.

Would you say that Google has a reputation for shipping things quickly?

I wouldn't.

But I left Google early this year to work at a startup. I can tell you that the confidence I have with Google's tooling, testing infra, presubmits etc. are miles ahead of the confidence I have with our current pre-commits. But at Google we had millions of daily-actives and at the startup we have dozens, so if something breaks it's not too bad.

Do any other company start as many new things as Google? Google builds things extremely quickly for being that large. Then they shut them down just as quickly, which is another matter, but it is hard to argue that they are slow at building products.

Can developer at Google run a copy of service in production environment and interactively develop it via REPL or some other hot code reload technique? It won't break any users if load balancer doesn't route real traffic to your instance.

Thanks for saying this. People love to jump on the bandwagon of CV driven development...

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