What's the minimum residency time to reliably detect problems with my PR? Add deployment time, double to account for jitter caused by humans being humans (forgetful, lunch, meetings, etc), and there probably are not enough hours in the day for 1000 people to be deploying the same monolith.
To increase residency time you can deploy separate units (You can have multiple deployment units even in a monorepo), and those also reduce the surface area of merges.
Honestly what are they doing with 1000 developers? Duplicated effort goes up considerably with a team and codebase of that size. If you forced me to hire that many people, I'd have a lot of them working on open source, trying to steward feature enhancements that help our process. Because otherwise they'd be running around writing proprietary versions of a bunch of shit that already exists and in a better more documented form.
Folks, when you hire enough devs, they feel empowered to rewrite the world. I have lived all sides of this phenomenon and rarely is it pretty.
Scaling is a concern that goes in both directions. Shopify has 1000 developers today. How screwed would they be if they suddenly had to drop to 600? Or even if there's a hiring freeze? What happens when the people who wrote these tools go work somewhere else?
When I do tool smithing work these days, it's always with an effort to provide the thinnest of shims around open source or commercial tools with healthy user communities, so that at the end of the day they have a larger pool of resources than what is in house. People move on. Money dries up. Mandates change.
"Being important" in a company is about how much you support new work, not how locked in people are to your old work. If you can't give your old work away then you're shackling yourself, both to your current responsibilities and to the company. I can't believe that I'm the only one who has ever stayed at a company out of guilt for how screwed they'd be if I left. But that quickly turns into resentment which is worse.
If you are important for new work, then you always get new challenges. You stay sharp and your resume looks good. If the company stops doing new work altogether, do you really want to stay there anyway? Plus you could always go back to one of your old projects.
What's the minimum residency time to reliably detect problems with my PR? Add deployment time, double to account for jitter caused by humans being humans (forgetful, lunch, meetings, etc), and there probably are not enough hours in the day for 1000 people to be deploying the same monolith.
To increase residency time you can deploy separate units (You can have multiple deployment units even in a monorepo), and those also reduce the surface area of merges.
Honestly what are they doing with 1000 developers? Duplicated effort goes up considerably with a team and codebase of that size. If you forced me to hire that many people, I'd have a lot of them working on open source, trying to steward feature enhancements that help our process. Because otherwise they'd be running around writing proprietary versions of a bunch of shit that already exists and in a better more documented form.