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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you understand how much early Google values engineer productivity.

> Because source control has nothing to do with their core business, and in addition to the cost of developing and deploying that solution, they now have to bear the cost of maintaining it, which is likely not insignificant.

God I hate this outsourcing mindset. It's so refreshing to see a company value their developer productivity that they make a custom tool for just their needs. The ROI is readily measurable as the increased productivity of hundreds of thousands of people writing code. It's also measurable in the simplified tooling of every single tool that needs to interact with the source control. Same thing with the decision to switch to multi-repo from a monorepo: lots of added overhead to every engineer and every tool.

Git sucks so much compared to Piper that it boggles the mind to even ask such a question.

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I haven't used piper, so I can't comment on that. But people seem to have focused on git. Remind me not to actually use product names as examples; it inevitably triggers people into holy wars and prevents them from actually seeing the point.

I don't care if the competing solution would have been git, Perforce, hg, or whatever. The point was not "git". The point was "off the shelf". I also do not dispute that Piper may well be a great system; I've never even seen it, so I wouldn't know.

The issue is not about "outsourcing" (which is a rather loaded term that should not be substituted for "using off the shelf products"). It's not about "engineer productivity", per se. The question is about overall business efficiency.

I'm sure it could make engineers that much more productive to have the latest and greatest laptop every year. That doesn't mean we replace all our hardware every year. We also don't give every developer a terabyte of RAM. It's the same basic issue.

It's always a trade; those dollars can potentially do more good somewhere else.

You'll note that I have at no point stated outright that I thought they made the wrong decision; only that I'm skeptical. I asked the question about the ROI, and people decided to get all heated about it. The only arguably inflammatory point in my comment was about Google's case of NIH.

It's really hard to deny that Google has acute NIH.

Sometimes that's a good thing; they've done some amazing things and given us some amazing technologies. Other times, I question their decisions.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

I don't think you are wrong; it's just that a lot of people here on this thread are current or former Googlers. Compared to them, you don't know Piper so your argument is at a disadvantage.

My perspective is simple: inventing its own source control system at Google is absolutely worthwhile and the ROI is highly positive. The tradeoff is worthwhile. You might say that before Piper existed it might be a gamble whether it would be worth it. But in hindsight, absolutely 100% yes it's worthwhile. It does not need to be argued, for anyone who has used it.

The only thing that is really subject to debate is whether Google's engineering leads had the foresight of what Piper would accomplish or whether they simply wanted to build something custom due to NIH and it only fortuitously turned out to be good. That's a question no one here can answer.

> I don't think you are wrong; it's just that a lot of people here on this thread are current or former Googlers. Compared to them, you don't know Piper so your argument is at a disadvantage.

Bah. Text boxes in browsers suck, and mine's not cooperating at the moment, so instead of writing another book, I'll just say: thank you for the reasonable response. =)

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