I agree somewhat, but it took me a bit to articulate to myself. It is nuanced.
Testing is what held everything together. They seem to have been taking it seriously and that alone was enough to keep a product of that scale (barely?) afloat. A success!?
But it sounds like every other good practice went out of the window. They are drowning in unimaginable amount of technical debt, ossified over decades. That, and the complaint about testing infra indicates to me that even their tests are a pile of sh*. He wasn't running them locally, so they were integration tests. Meaning that had there been a foundation of unit tests - they wouldn't need that many slow integration tests.
It sounds like they just brute forced all their problems with test farms. I'm almost sure they double down on AI - why make your code base better if AI can figure out how 100 flags can interact with each other.
Testing is what held everything together. They seem to have been taking it seriously and that alone was enough to keep a product of that scale (barely?) afloat. A success!?
But it sounds like every other good practice went out of the window. They are drowning in unimaginable amount of technical debt, ossified over decades. That, and the complaint about testing infra indicates to me that even their tests are a pile of sh*. He wasn't running them locally, so they were integration tests. Meaning that had there been a foundation of unit tests - they wouldn't need that many slow integration tests.
It sounds like they just brute forced all their problems with test farms. I'm almost sure they double down on AI - why make your code base better if AI can figure out how 100 flags can interact with each other.