https://twitter.com/ceejbot/status/852323661591728128
i can't get more than halfway through this article. i just... can't.
the author means well, but he gets most of the history jumbled so that it doesn't make any sense. (which is understandable, since he didn't join until 2013, years after all of that history happened)
i think he's trying to tell a story about how a bunch of disorganized engineering could have gone better if it had a team of support engineers, but the real story is hidden in plain sight. he mentions it over and over again. an entire new team is bought but never integrated with the existing team. "directors" make engineering decisions by fiat, and quit (or are resigned) weeks later. one group rewrites all scala code in java while another rewrites all java code in scala, while sitting literally in the same room, but too stubborn to talk to each other. all progress slows to a crawl as code is merged into a giant ball-o-yarn repo, and the blame goes to the repo not being big enough yet. build tools are written with no clear purpose, open-sourced to a world that doesn't want or need them, and yet somehow still fractures into incompatible versions within the single company.
you could hire 10,000 very smart engineers to "support" this madness and nothing would improve, because you can't force people to get along.
i hope the second half was more uplifting, but the first half depressed me too much to continue reading.