[krasin]

I work for Google for the 3rd time; 12+ years in total. It's first time when this issue is brought to my conscience. I think that the issue exists, but it's not due to the monorepo, it's due to the internal APIs changing.

I learned how to avoid the Google3 tax that you mentioned, when the old thing is deprecated, and the new one is not working yet.

Surprisingly, the answer for me was to embrace Google Cloud: its APIs have stability guarantees. My current project depends on Google Cloud Storage, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Firestore and very few internal technologies.

I believe that this is in general a trend at Google: increasing reliance on Google Cloud for new projects. In this sense, both internal and external developers are in the same boat.

As for the monorepo - it's a blessing, in my perspective. Less rotten code, much easier to contribute improvements across the stack.