> it forces teams to deal with issues that they're not necessarily ready to deal with just yet.
Exactly this. Polyrepos, microservices, and their ilk all do the same thing. Bring forward problems you may one day need to solve and make solving them necessary for progress.
Yea. We had a monorepo. The whole thing was one big webapp.
Even our background workers ran in the web app. Oh yea, that's right. I can feel the cringing just writing that! So like if we had an expensive background operation, our web app would start up a thread and do the work. Some might be wondering: "What if you needed to restart it? Like, I dunno... when deploying code?". Answer: we didn't, lol. Our deploy script would hold all new jobs and wait until existing ones finished before restarting. Some background process were extremely time consuming (eg: 10+ hours) and those we wrote in a way that they could just resume if killed.
It's actually amazing how productive you can be with a single monolithic web app on a beefy cloud instance.
I was also surprised how quickly we were able to scale out to a proper multi-service architecture after being bought. It only took us 6 months. The big company that bought us plans ahead years. It was no problem at all.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating for sloppy engineering here. Our team was some of the smartest people I've ever worked with. It wasn't uncommon for me (a medium-experienced engineer) to bring a proposal to our technical founder that would require like 1 month of work. That freakin' genius would reframe the problem and architecture such that we'd spend 2 days, still achieve the same goal, and take on minimal technical debt. I learned A LOT.
I know I'm rambling, but honestly I don't know if that kind of hustle is even a thing anymore. Are tech startups still scrappy? Are they focusing on the core problems/solutions they're trying to prove out instead of layers of architecture? Do such problems even exist anymore? Back in the mid-2000s it felt like that's how everyone did it.
There's nothing wrong with the architecture you describe. In fact, I've even migrated/merged microservices into a monolith several times. What you describe about restarting, etc. is accurate, and you need to solve for that even in other architectures.
Conway's law is more important: "I need to deploy my team's change without waiting for your team's job to finish".
Exactly this. Polyrepos, microservices, and their ilk all do the same thing. Bring forward problems you may one day need to solve and make solving them necessary for progress.