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I find it easier to work in companies with monorepos. It’s much easier to grep for what you’re looking for. There’s no complexity hiding somewhere you don’t know about.

Whenever I work somewhere with lots of repos I create a folder called dev and clone every single repo into it.

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I think to myself, “doesn’t everyone do this with multiple repos?” Then I consider some of the workflows of colleagues and have a proper realization. Overtime, unless a lot of thought is given to developer processes, the tooling becomes death by a thousand cuts. It’s a small custom configuration here, a small one-off case there, and soon it takes a day or two to setup a new developer’s machine. There are trade offs with mono repo or multiple repos. In either case a continuous revisiting of processes and optimizations is required. Unfortunately, even then, people are stubborn and will do what they know “works” even if not optimal.

You’ve hit the crux of the issue. The discussion of monorepo vs polyrepo/microservices is always a red herring. Ultimately when you unwrap it, it’s always a tooling issue. People will always have complaints and opinions about which is better, but the actual answer about which method is better is whichever method has the proper tooling built for it and that the company has bothered to take the time and effort to invest into. If the company doesn’t do that, both methods will suck. And ultimately that is, as you imply, an ongoing conversation because tooling needs grow and change for an organization over time.

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