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by ZeroCool2u 2364 days ago
Hey Drew, I'm a huge fan and have a lot of respect for your work.

I feel like I see the pattern of people on HN being disappointed in some of the tools that come out of Google and other large engineering orgs, when they don't work out really well in orgs that are not operating at the same scale. People have similar complaints about the complexity of other projects that come out of Google. K8s comes to mind as one such example. Often times these tools must be robust to such a large variety of uses that they are simply overkill for smaller organizations. I'll readily admit that I could be wrong and Bazel is simply poorly designed, but it is perhaps worth considering that the build system used by an engineering team of 50 need not be as complex as the build system used by one of the largest engineering orgs in the world. My guess is we'd see a lot less backlash if people tried to step off the hype train for a moment and critically evaluate whether they really need to use something like Bazel or K8s when something simpler would suffice.
2 comments
detaro 2364 days ago
Bazel advertises itself as

> Build and test software of any size, quickly and reliably

Given the comments here, a tagline focusing on its strengths for large orgs/projects probably would be better marketing.

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anaphor 2364 days ago
They need to do a better job of making the assumptions behind the design of the tools clearer then. Because, from what I can tell, many people get the idea that the path to success is to do what Google does (even knowing about the meme that people just try and copy Google). This doesn't just apply to their software tools, but also to their corporate processes (OKRs, etc).
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jacquesm 2364 days ago
> the path to success is to do what Google does

This kind of cargo-cult process copying has infested the start-up world and is akin to sending a lot of shirts to the laundromat because that's what rich people do and you want to be rich too.

These things work for large companies because they are large companies. Their problems and associated solutions rarely if ever are a good match for the kind of issues that your average start-up contends with, especially early on in the life cycle.

You and your buddy the first-hire developers are not going to gain anything by copying the Spotify development model, and other examples in that vein.

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packetslave 2364 days ago
OKRs came from Intel, FWIW. Google got them via John Doerr.
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