alt Hacker NewsReading it with hindsight, their problems have less to do with the technical trade off of micro or monolith services and much more to do with the quality and organizational structure of their engineering department. The decisions and reasons given shine a light on the quality. The repository and test layout shine a light on the structure.
Given the quality and the structure neither approach really matters much. The root problems are elsewhere.
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>the quality and organizational structure of their engineering department
You're not kidding. I had to work with twilio on a project and it was awful. Any time there was an issue with the API, they'd never delve into why that issue had happened. They'd simply fix the data in their database and close the ticket. We'd have the same issue over and over and over again and they'd never make any effort to fix the cause of the problems.
Conway's Law shines again!
It's amazing how much explanatory power it has, to the point that I can predict at least some traits about a company's codebase during an interview process, without directly asking them about it.
My observation is that many teams lack strong "technical discipline"; someone that says "no, don't do that", makes the case, and takes a stand. It's easy to let the complexity genie out of the bottle if the team doesn't have someone like this with enough clout/authority to actually make the team pause.