4 ms·

Why would you so willingly give up what are intended to be company secrets like that?

by warent 9y ago

scarmig 9y ago
These are only secrets in the most tendentious sense. Half the people at Facebook worked at Google before anyway, and there are maybe a half dozen companies that could plausibly get the benefits of going Google-scale for source control. And they already have all their internal systems: if they lack all the same capabilities as Google, it's not because Google's systems are secret but because of other challenges.
meddlepal 9y ago
Because it's not really secret? Numerous articles have been written about this stuff for years and years and also it's not hard to get [G|X]ooglers to talk about this stuff candidly in casual convo.
bsder 9y ago
Heh. Youngsters. They still think that ideas are the bottleneck. :) Google could hand you the source code, and you still wouldn't be able to implement what they have and compete against them. Execution is more important than almost anything else. Occasionally you need to cough up a really clever idea. Those days are really rare, though.
- themind 9y ago
  A refreshing comment. I feel like people often overlook the importance of execution. Though, basing one's execution off shaky ideas is not really the best either.
- Jach 9y ago
  Yeah, the mono repo / distributed division is almost a red herring.. A key component to the division though is fault and responsibility in making something as relatively unimportant as the source control and build systems work well. Google has put a lot of money and effort to make their system nice. Working in a mono repo without that much effort is very frustrating, doubly so because there's nothing individual teams can do about it. It's especially worse if you can't even make team specific branches on the mono repo to try and isolate yourself from the steady stream of breaking changes elsewhere. However if you're a team lucky enough to get out and do most things on your own git repo, then you're now the only ones responsible for making that better or worse. Fortunately there's a ton of open source to learn from and use, so taking control of your own team's destiny to get to a point better than before doesn't have to mean much work.
  - DannyBee 9y ago
    " Google has put a lot of money and effort to make their system nice. Working in a mono repo without that much effort is very frustrating, doubly so because there's nothing individual teams can do about it." Sure there is. They can architect code in a way that it doesn't break heavily when other people do things. IE abstract things reasonably. They can test things well. and they can complain when other teams aren't doing either and it's making them less effective.

Why would you so willingly give up what are intended to be company secrets like that?

by warent 9y ago

Why would you so willingly give up what are intended to be company secrets like that?

These are only secrets in the most tendentious sense. Half the people at Facebook worked at Google before anyway, and there are maybe a half dozen companies that could plausibly get the benefits of going Google-scale for source control. And they already have all their internal systems: if they lack all the same capabilities as Google, it's not because Google's systems are secret but because of other challenges.

meddlepal 9y ago

Because it's not really secret? Numerous articles have been written about this stuff for years and years and also it's not hard to get [G|X]ooglers to talk about this stuff candidly in casual convo.

bsder 9y ago

Heh. Youngsters. They still think that ideas are the bottleneck. :) Google could hand you the source code, and you still wouldn't be able to implement what they have and compete against them. Execution is more important than almost anything else. Occasionally you need to cough up a really clever idea. Those days are really rare, though.

themind 9y ago
A refreshing comment. I feel like people often overlook the importance of execution. Though, basing one's execution off shaky ideas is not really the best either.
Jach 9y ago
Yeah, the mono repo / distributed division is almost a red herring.. A key component to the division though is fault and responsibility in making something as relatively unimportant as the source control and build systems work well. Google has put a lot of money and effort to make their system nice. Working in a mono repo without that much effort is very frustrating, doubly so because there's nothing individual teams can do about it. It's especially worse if you can't even make team specific branches on the mono repo to try and isolate yourself from the steady stream of breaking changes elsewhere. However if you're a team lucky enough to get out and do most things on your own git repo, then you're now the only ones responsible for making that better or worse. Fortunately there's a ton of open source to learn from and use, so taking control of your own team's destiny to get to a point better than before doesn't have to mean much work.
- DannyBee 9y ago
  " Google has put a lot of money and effort to make their system nice. Working in a mono repo without that much effort is very frustrating, doubly so because there's nothing individual teams can do about it." Sure there is. They can architect code in a way that it doesn't break heavily when other people do things. IE abstract things reasonably. They can test things well. and they can complain when other teams aren't doing either and it's making them less effective.