[klodolph]

My personal experience in large orgs is that friction is a much larger problem at larger orgs than it is at smaller orgs. The friction was always much lower, day-to-day, at small orgs. (Small orgs front-load the friction somewhat... "Here, set up your development environment.")

[WorldMaker]

That's a fair way to view it, and my experience is also that a lot of that friction at its worst tends to accrete around bureaucratic barriers and fiefdoms. That also plays out in its own ways to the compiler warnings analogy: if there's a lot of friction touching a particular code for bureaucratic reasons, often the bureaucracy doesn't go away in the monorepo case it just disappears until it painfully shows back up later in the process. For instance, multi-repo may add a lot of friction to even finding/getting access to the repo in the first place but once you have access after bureaucratic red tape, PRs may be painless. Yet there are certainly all sorts of monorepo horror stories of making an "easy" PR and then finding that PR get bogged down in a lot of politics as bureaucrats crawl out of the woodwork from PR pings (sometimes pings they themselves set and the PR creator isn't ever aware of until the PR is sent). The bureaucracy is much the same in both cases, the pain is very similar, in one case it is just front loaded and obvious. (Everyone knows "Oh, Bob owns that repo. You need to fill out these forms, take it to the castle next door, and look for the ogre to give the forms to. That's Bob. Then you can make PRs to your hearts content if Bob likes you and doesn't eat you." versus a troll jumping out from under a bridge to completing a PR that you never expected and demanding a sacrifice of some goats before you may cross the bridge.)