<story><title>2 Years at Twitter</title><url>https://eed3si9n.com/2years-at-twitter/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gravypod</author><text>There are many people who are commenting that this is so much work for 20m lines of code, they&amp;#x27;re reinventing the wheel, they should have just bought something off the shelf, etc.&lt;p&gt;Two things to consider:&lt;p&gt;1. It is sometimes hard to buy things that works well: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;danluu.com&amp;#x2F;nothing-works&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;danluu.com&amp;#x2F;nothing-works&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;2. The productivity gains of something like Bazel and Pants are pretty amazing if you are working within a monorepo.&lt;p&gt;It is very difficult to understand how big these two things play into these decisions. Having ~20 people manage build tooling, build caching, source control, CI (build+test), and building release artifacts (which it sounds like Pants did) is not a bad deal.&lt;p&gt;Consider:&lt;p&gt;1. GitLab will charge you $20&amp;#x2F;month&amp;#x2F;user.&lt;p&gt;2. If you have 2000 SWEs you&amp;#x27;ll pay 40k&amp;#x2F;month just to have access to the website.&lt;p&gt;3. You&amp;#x27;ll still need to hire a person or two to negotiate the purchasing of the GitLab.&lt;p&gt;Now remember that GitLab might not be prefect for your use case. GitLab doesn&amp;#x27;t increase the performance of builds on your laptop by sharing a cache with all engineers. There&amp;#x27;s also a limit to the mount of data you can store for source + build artifacts (50GB). The CI runners they host for you are very expensive for how slow the machines are ($10&amp;#x2F;1000 minutes).&lt;p&gt;Sure, you can do things like run your own GitLab runners but now you&amp;#x27;re back to running your own infrastructure which is an engineer&amp;#x27;s job. Sure, you could save money by using Gitea or something that if free but again hosting your own infra. As soon as you have someone managing that infrastructure they&amp;#x27;re bound to say &amp;quot;how else can I save time and money&amp;quot; and at a certain scale these things become reasonable or even required.</text></comment>
<story><title>2 Years at Twitter</title><url>https://eed3si9n.com/2years-at-twitter/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ralph84</author><text>Another company that copied the engineering practices of Google without the profitability to support a huge internal tools team.</text></comment>