It's almost never a good idea to get inspired by what Google / Meta / Huge Company is doing as most of the times you don't have their problems and they have custom toolings and teams making everything work on that scale.
In this case, I'd say it's the opposite: monorepo as an approach works amazingly well for small teams all the ways up to huge orgs (with the right tooling to support it).
The difference is that past a certain level of complexity, the org will most certainly need specialized tooling to support massive codebases to make CI/CD (build, test, deploy, etc.) times sane.
On the other hand, multi-repos may work for massive orgs, but is always going to add friction for small orgs.
In this case I wasn't even referring to mono repo or not, but more about the idea of taking inspiration from very large companies for your own not-large-company problems.
I feel like this has been repeated so much now that peoples takeaway is that you shouldn't adopt anything from large companies as a small company by default. And thats simply not true.
The point here is to understand what are the problems that are being solved, understand if they are similar to yours, and make a decision based on wether the tradeoffs are a good fit for you.
Not necessarily disagreeing with you but I just feel the pendulum on this statement has swung to far to the other side now.
> peoples takeaway is that you shouldn't adopt anything from large companies as a small company by default. And thats simply not true.
Yes it is. You said so yourself:
> The point here is to understand what are the problems that are being solved, understand if they are similar to yours, and make a decision based on wether the tradeoffs are a good fit for you.
That's you agreeing: “understand and make a decision” is pretty much the exact opposite of “adopt anything by default” — which
peoples takeaway is that you shouldn't do — isn't it? So you're agreeing with the general takeaway, not arguing against it.
I think this pendulum has stopped swinging and come to a rest. And pendulums (pendula? penduli?) always stop pointing straight down, midway between the extremes: You shouldn't mindlessly reject something just because it comes from a big company, but certainly not blindly adopt it just because it does, either. But, just as you said, understand if it fits for you and then decide based on that.
And hey, on this particular issue, it seems some big companies do it one way, and others the opposite — so maybe the (non-existent) “average big company” is halfway between the extremes, too. (Whatever that means; one-and-a-half repository? Or half an infinity of repositories?)
The difference is that past a certain level of complexity, the org will most certainly need specialized tooling to support massive codebases to make CI/CD (build, test, deploy, etc.) times sane.
On the other hand, multi-repos may work for massive orgs, but is always going to add friction for small orgs.