Is this a good comparison? Not everyone is Google-size. In fact, very few businesses are. What is managable for Google or a good practice for Google, might be unsustainable for another business.
I think the lesson to draw from bigorgs isn't what to as a smallorg, but what directions you can grow and what the pitfalls are on those roads.
Any smallorg probably wants a bare monorepo, git or what have you. If you grow to the point that becomes unwieldy, you can either invest in tooling the way Google has, or be prepared to split the repo into library and project repos in a way that makes sense for what your mediumorg has grown into.
Google is a monorepo with sixteen layers of tooling to make it searchable, to not require you to spent 3 days making a local copy before editing, to manage permissions across orgs, etc etc etc.
A small organization of 1-20 people should not emulate the layers of tooling; just have a single git repo somewhere and call it a day.
Google isn't successful because of their tech decisions. They just happen to make an infinite amount of ad money; everything else they do is mainly getting their engineers to play in sandboxes to distract them so they won't leave to start other ad markets. It works though, since everyone is in love with their complex makework ideas.
I suspect Google spends more on developer tooling than any organization of on the planet. Probably worth considering that whenever trying to see whether something would work for you.
I want to think they have. But... this is also why they kill older products. The cost of keeping the lights on is greatly elevated when keeping the lights on means keeping up with the latest codes.
This is absolutely no different from buildings. If you had to keep every building up to date with the latest building codes, you would tear them down way way way more often.
> this is also why they kill older products. The cost of keeping the lights on is greatly elevated when keeping the lights on means keeping up with the latest codes.
This is a really good point and I think accurate when it comes to smaller Google endeavors. I don't think this killed Stadia, for example, but maybe Google Trips (an amazing service that I don't think many folks used and likely had few development resources assigned, or none).
Yeah, I would not mean this to include Stadia. That said, if it adds costs to the smaller Trips and such, it has to add cost to the larger things, too. That is, if it makes the cheap things expensive, it probably makes the expensive things even more so.
Not exactly unsustainable considering Google has been very successful with this approach!
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