4 ms·

I just cannot understand how a CTO approves this type of project. Imagine running a company and some engineer comes in and and says they want to develop a new s

I just cannot understand how a CTO approves this type of project. Imagine running a company and some engineer comes in and and says they want to develop a new source control system. I don't understand under what circumstances this is approved. Is it a pet project for a 10x engineer and it's allowed just to keep them on board? There are projects, like Apache Hadoop, that are open-sourced because they're an open-source answer to an extremely powerful, successful, commercial product. Sapling is nothing like this. The reason it's being open-sourced is because Meta considers it tech debt and I'm not surprised.

hu3 4y ago
> The reason it's being open-sourced, unsurprisingly, is because Meta considers it tech debt. I understand the sentiment and my suspicion is similar. Do you have a source?
Macha 4y ago
I think projects like this happen at two extremes of company size. Small companies, where the team is a few engineers empowered to do whatever without having to justify to "adult supervision", and megacorps where there is actually a team, with engineers assigned, who's job is something super specific like "manage our source control"
reissbaker 4y ago
The simple reason is that Mercurial and git were way too slow for large repos, and FB wanted a monorepo for productivity reasons. It's cheaper to fund this project than reduce engineering productivity by even 1% at the scale of FB. Google did exactly the same thing, but hasn't open-sourced their tools. Projects to drive incremental productivity make not a lot of sense for small companies, but become immensely valuable at very large companies. A 1% improvement if you have an engineering staff of even just 10k is worth 100 engineers, and FB is much larger than 10k.
- astrange 4y ago
  Just as "inventing your own source control system" is a hobby, "being a very large engineering organization" is a hobby. FB and Google started with infinite money spigots and used it to hire a lot of people who make a lot of commits; if you laid them off, or if you canceled half the remaining Google products they haven't already canceled, not all that much would change.
  - reissbaker 4y ago
    Google and FB each killed off earlier competitors who had similar spigots. The idea that you can simply discover an "infinite money spigot" once, sit back, and reap the rewards from it forever, is not borne out by anything in humanity's history.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
netheril96 4y ago
> Imagine running a company and some engineer comes in and and says they want to develop a new source control system. I don't understand under what circumstances this is approved. Under the circumstance that no existing source control system can handle a monorepo as large as Google's or FB's. The custom source control system is not a hobby. It is vital to both companies.

hu3 4y ago

> The reason it's being open-sourced, unsurprisingly, is because Meta considers it tech debt. I understand the sentiment and my suspicion is similar. Do you have a source?

Macha 4y ago

I think projects like this happen at two extremes of company size. Small companies, where the team is a few engineers empowered to do whatever without having to justify to "adult supervision", and megacorps where there is actually a team, with engineers assigned, who's job is something super specific like "manage our source control"

reissbaker 4y ago

The simple reason is that Mercurial and git were way too slow for large repos, and FB wanted a monorepo for productivity reasons. It's cheaper to fund this project than reduce engineering productivity by even 1% at the scale of FB. Google did exactly the same thing, but hasn't open-sourced their tools. Projects to drive incremental productivity make not a lot of sense for small companies, but become immensely valuable at very large companies. A 1% improvement if you have an engineering staff of even just 10k is worth 100 engineers, and FB is much larger than 10k.

astrange 4y ago
Just as "inventing your own source control system" is a hobby, "being a very large engineering organization" is a hobby. FB and Google started with infinite money spigots and used it to hire a lot of people who make a lot of commits; if you laid them off, or if you canceled half the remaining Google products they haven't already canceled, not all that much would change.
- reissbaker 4y ago
  Google and FB each killed off earlier competitors who had similar spigots. The idea that you can simply discover an "infinite money spigot" once, sit back, and reap the rewards from it forever, is not borne out by anything in humanity's history.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

netheril96 4y ago

> Imagine running a company and some engineer comes in and and says they want to develop a new source control system. I don't understand under what circumstances this is approved. Under the circumstance that no existing source control system can handle a monorepo as large as Google's or FB's. The custom source control system is not a hobby. It is vital to both companies.