In my opinion, the monorepo, global presubmit, testing culture and the beyonce rule (if you liked it then you should have put a test on it) are basically a superpower for infrastructure teams. Without these things it'd be utterly impossible for certain kinds of infra refactors to be done and many more would be very very painful.
In the open source world I see a fair amount of "tests are always red, don't worry" and "we can never edit this interface because who knows who it breaks." These problems aren't intractable at Google.
This approach does have its own set of challenges and I do suspect that the monorepo has contributed in some ways to Google's inability or refusal to maintain some older products. But holy cow the ability to do something like move everybody in the company to different vocabulary types is powerful.
On the other hand, most weeks someone else breaks my system and I have to track down the culprit.
Google's emphasis has always been to make things easy for library developers, at the expense of library clients. For people who value backwards compatibility over long timespans, Google's practices could be better.
I dont think its fair to classify code review and test coverage as “the google way.” Should evaluate more by the unique things google does or the things they specifically invented (not code review and testing).
And of course volunteers working on open source projects have lower standards. Lets instead compare Google to companies which say “we arent google.”
What I am describing is not code review and test coverage. What I am describing is the ability to run all of the tests for the entire company in one go so you can safely make absolutely massive changes to the codebase.
In the open source world I see a fair amount of "tests are always red, don't worry" and "we can never edit this interface because who knows who it breaks." These problems aren't intractable at Google.
This approach does have its own set of challenges and I do suspect that the monorepo has contributed in some ways to Google's inability or refusal to maintain some older products. But holy cow the ability to do something like move everybody in the company to different vocabulary types is powerful.