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To be fair a majority of the big technology companies all write their own tooling for many things that already exist because they didn't quite fit the way they

To be fair a majority of the big technology companies all write their own tooling for many things that already exist because they didn't quite fit the way they needed them to and they had the resources to re-invent whatever they want. Sure when they open source them it further fragments the market and you always get the rush of "Facebook has almost 2 billion users therefore their tools must be the best!" which further exacerbates the issue but I don't blame Facebook for these issues. It sounds like, in your situation, perhaps there are too many tools being introduced into your projects. Too often I see developers abuse the hell out of npm and the like to just include whatever they need with zero regard for the newly introduced dependency tree and the new tooling that needs to now be maintained.

cwyers 10y ago
When Facebook wrote this, the tooling that already existed wasn't available to them -- ex-Google engineers at Facebook wanted something like Bazel/Blaze, but Google had yet to release that publicly. So this is a Hadoop situation where Google had this internal tool that someone else really wanted and because Google didn't open-source it they wrote their own version.
- asymmetric 10y ago
  Isn't there a risk that reimplementing a previous employer's tool constitutes a legal/contractual violation of some kind?
  - Asooka 10y ago
    It's almost certain that it is a legal violation and if a lawsuit was brought, I'd bet a million dollars in favour of Google; however, the tool itself isn't the final product and it's silly, counterproductive and just outright malicious to sabotage efforts at building good tooling in a competitor's company. Plus, it will set precedent and Google would have to vet every single new internal tool against what the previous employers of their employees were doing.
whywhywhywhy 10y ago
> To be fair a majority of the big technology companies all write their own tooling for many things that already exist because they didn't quite fit the way they needed them Too many engineers syndrome comes to mind too.

cwyers 10y ago

When Facebook wrote this, the tooling that already existed wasn't available to them -- ex-Google engineers at Facebook wanted something like Bazel/Blaze, but Google had yet to release that publicly. So this is a Hadoop situation where Google had this internal tool that someone else really wanted and because Google didn't open-source it they wrote their own version.

asymmetric 10y ago
Isn't there a risk that reimplementing a previous employer's tool constitutes a legal/contractual violation of some kind?
- Asooka 10y ago
  It's almost certain that it is a legal violation and if a lawsuit was brought, I'd bet a million dollars in favour of Google; however, the tool itself isn't the final product and it's silly, counterproductive and just outright malicious to sabotage efforts at building good tooling in a competitor's company. Plus, it will set precedent and Google would have to vet every single new internal tool against what the previous employers of their employees were doing.

whywhywhywhy 10y ago

> To be fair a majority of the big technology companies all write their own tooling for many things that already exist because they didn't quite fit the way they needed them Too many engineers syndrome comes to mind too.