Really large tech companies with truly massive codebases (especially monorepos) often need custom tooling to build things, so “ Being able to build the project

Really large tech companies with truly massive codebases (especially monorepos) often need custom tooling to build things, so “ Being able to build the project on your own machine is pretty much mandatory because if you can't build locally then e.g. IDE autocompletions does not work because there is no working compile_commands.json.” isn’t always true. Facebook, for example, uses a highly custom version of VS Code (was: atom) that talks to a server for each developer. The devbox contains the repo and is mostly prebuilt because trying to check out and compile a codebase that is easily 20 times bigger than a linux distro just isn’t feasible on a laptop. So long as there is a well resourced dev productivity team in the company, whatever they use for a huge codebase is likely fine.