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I think you are looking at this from a hindsight perfectionist bias. Maybe that is the right decision. But Google has organically grown over the decades and th

by pests 2y ago

I think you are looking at this from a hindsight perfectionist bias. Maybe that is the right decision. But Google has organically grown over the decades and their tooling evolved with that. It's hard to say which requirements they were working with and what they were trying to optimize for - sometimes higher costs are just okay if they allow or enable other things.

floating-io 2y ago
There is validity to that, it just seems to be a very odd decision to me. If I was going to do custom infrastructure, Source control is not where I would be looking. I'd rather put up with a few warts there and focus the time and resources that saves elsewhere. For me it's always "what are we trading?". In an organization the size of Google, it's far easier to amortize away the cost of such a thing. That doesn't mean it's not a cost, though. And there's a lot of tooling around modern SCM that they won't get because they're on a bespoke system, so there's a cost there too. As you say, at the time the variables may have been very different. It's just an area where if I had to make that decision (even back then), someone would have had to be exceptionally persuasive to convince me to authorize what is effectively a multi-million dollar project... to recreate source control. =)