[mlthoughts2018]

There absolutely is something about monorepos that begets monopolicies: exactly the very thing that makes them co-occur. It doesn’t matter if it’s sociological or technological, the co-occurrence itself is the thing.

I’d flip it around and say instead that you are assuming the properties by which to compare the two approaches ought to be properties that are roughly like “first principles” and that no first principles difference really exists between them in terms of limiting what you can do.

But this is the wrong way to look at it because, pragmatically, it’s simply just not the sociological phenomenon that actually happens as a side effect in terms of the practical result. Who cares if there’s a first principles reason for them to be different in terms of effectiveness? I certainly don’t— they just are different in terms of effectiveness.

[joshuamorton]

>There absolutely is something about monorepos that begets monopolicies

Correlation (and a weak one at that) is not causation.

I can just as easily suggest that monopolicies beget monorepos, and that indeed makes a lot more sense. Its easier to enforce global standards when there's a single repo. So companies who wish to enforce draconian standards may move in that direction. That says nothing about companies that don't wish to enforce draconian standards though.

[mlthoughts2018]

If monorepos enable monopolicies (even if monorepos are compatible with usage that doesn’t involve monopolicies), that’s perfectly good reason to avoid them regardless of whether they cause monopolicies.

In “The Beginning of Infinity,” physicist David Deutsch makes a point like this about styles of government. Deutsch suggests the defining characteristic of a good governmental system should not be whether it consistently produces good policies, but instead that there is an extremely low-cost barrier to removing bad policies once it becomes clear they are bad.

Thinking this way, if monorepos permit a situation where there are monopolicies about allowed languages, allowed deployment tooling, etc., and those policies cannot be quickly discarded when it becomes clear they are bad for a certain business goal, then this is perfectly good reason to disfavor monorepos regardless of whether they cause the bad policies.

I think your responses continue to miss the point because you’re talking about correlation and causation as if it matters in a situation like this: but it precisely doesn’t matter.

If a tool doesn’t actively prevent certain policy failure modes (even if it does not cause anyone to choose a bad policy), that is a relative failure of the tool.

Contrasting with polyrepos where it is quite harder to enforce failed monopolicy ideas is one area where polyrepos are a better tool: to misuse polyrepos policy-wise you have to go way out of your way and add a lot of draconian policy enforcement tooling that often can still be circumvented. Those inherent barriers are a good thing that monorepos don’t have.

Separately, I’d also say that the political failure mode where central IT wants to enforce draconian policies is extremely common, and those types of organizations specifically see a monorepo as a tool of (their desired) oppression and control.

Since the base rate of occurrence of horrible companies is super high among all companies, it probably does mean that P(bad | monorepo) is pretty high conditional evidence of a bad workplace culture.

[joshuamorton]

No. A user may wish to avoid a company given that they have a monorepo, but you've not given any reason for an it department to avoid a monorepo, which is essentially what this article is about.

[mlthoughts2018]

Yes, I have clearly given strong reasons for an organization to avoid monorepos. Gainsaying that without supporting comments doesn’t achieve anything.