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.

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jiggawatts a day ago | parent [-]

> unimaginable amount of technical debt

"That's life" in the RDBMS space. All of the major vendors are drowning in tech debt and there's (almost) nothing they can do about it because of backward compatibility limitations.

For example, Microsoft SQL Server 2025 will create new databases with default settings that are unchanged from SQL 7 -- from the previous century!

	▲	3pm 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Requiring backward compatibility doesn't imply the code quality needs to be low. Nothing prevents them from improving their code base except the organization itself - the incentives, promotion driven development etc.