> 2. The productivity gains of something like Bazel and Pants are pretty amazing if you are working within a monorepo.
In theory, maybe. But can anyone external honestly look at what Twitter has shipped for the last few years and justify that it was at all likely their productivity problems in engineering had anything to do with the build system.
I've worked as an FTE in a platform team for a major public tech company before, and I don't know many smart ones that came out of that thinking it was a good trade off to have teams whose very survival necessitated potentially unnecessary platform tooling / changes -- unless you're literally Google or FB and can see measurable results from optimizing that tooling.
> But can anyone external honestly look at what Twitter has shipped for the last few years and justify that it was at all likely their productivity problems in engineering had anything to do with the build system.
You say you've worked at a "major public tech company before", so why would you assume Twitter's paralysis was the fault of engineering and not management/product?
In theory, maybe. But can anyone external honestly look at what Twitter has shipped for the last few years and justify that it was at all likely their productivity problems in engineering had anything to do with the build system.
I've worked as an FTE in a platform team for a major public tech company before, and I don't know many smart ones that came out of that thinking it was a good trade off to have teams whose very survival necessitated potentially unnecessary platform tooling / changes -- unless you're literally Google or FB and can see measurable results from optimizing that tooling.
Twitter never got close to that point.