Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 013a | Hacker News Reader

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I call this "Google Imposter Syndrome". Because Google (insert Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc) has success with Monorepos (insert gRPC, Go, Kubernetes, React/Native, etc), it must be a great idea, we should do it. You see this everywhere. Also known as an Appeal to Authority.

My personal opinion: very few companies will hit a point where sheer volume of code or code changes makes a monorepo unwieldy. Code volume is a Google-problem. But every company will have problems with Github/Gitlab/whatever tooling with multiple repos; coordinating merges/deploys across multiple projects, managing issues, context switches between them, etc. And every company will also have problems with CI/CD in a monorepo.

Point being... there are problems with both, and there are benefits to both. I don't think one is right or wrong. I personally feel that solving the problems inherent to monorepos, at average scale, is easier than solving the problems inherent to distributed repos. The monorepo problems are generally internal technical, whereas the distributed repo problems are generally people-related and tooling outside of your control.

Someone at some point said "Google may not be successful for the interview practises they use; they're big enough that they could very well be successful despite the interview practises they use."

It stuck with me, and is applicable to so many things. Including, maybe, this?

Another question is just the sheer scale of the FAANG companies, making things work at that scale is likely to be counterintuitive sometimes.

I just looked it up, Facebook has 2.2 billion users monthly. That's almost a third of the entire planet.

Shit that makes sense for them won't make sense for 99% of everyone else.

I've seen multiple companies struggling with maintaining interdependencies between multiple repos. It often results in an expensive custom solution. As a general guideline I'd say "when in doubt, put the code in a single repo"

Most people/companies aren't Google, but as you say they assume that if one or more of the tech gigants (or other very public tech companies) are doing something, then it must be good.

Often the focus is extremely weird. When people noticed that WhatsApp only employed something like 45 engineers, then most assumed that it was because they used Erlang and FreeBSD. The thought that maybe their success was do to hiring the very best engineers and paying accordingly is less attractive.

Monorepos is just a another item to the heap of things that may be a good idea, but it depends.

also known as "cargo culting"

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