Your Build Takes 45 Minutes and Developers Are Going to Lunch During CI Runs

Here's what actually happens when your startup grows beyond 50 developers.

When Everything Breaks at Once

I watched a team spend 8 months migrating to Nx 15.8. Their builds went from 20 minutes to 3 minutes, which sounds great until you realize that 3-minute builds turn into 30-minute builds once you have enough interdependencies. The real kicker? When the build breaks, it breaks for everyone. All 200 developers just stop working until someone figures out why the TypeScript compiler ran out of heap space with error TS2556.

Microservices aren't better. At my last company, we had something like 50 services for what could have been one application. Want to test a feature end-to-end? Good luck spinning up 12 different services locally. Oh, and service A depends on version 2.1.3 of the auth library, but service B needs 2.2.0, and they're not compatible. Have fun with that dependency hell.

The Tools: Pick Your Poison

Nx is like having a really smart roommate who organizes everything perfectly but judges your life choices. It works great until you need to do something slightly different from what the Nx team anticipated. Then you're reading 400-page configuration docs at 2 AM wondering why your "simple" React app needs 17 different configuration files.

The learning curve is fucking brutal. I've seen senior engineers take 3 weeks just to figure out why nx generate @nrwl/react:lib shared-utils fails with "Cannot find module '@nrwl/devkit'". The plugin ecosystem is nice when it works, but debugging generator failures will make you question your career choices.

Turborepo is what Nx should be - simple and fast. Installation actually works out of the box, which is shocking in the JavaScript ecosystem. The caching is solid and the configuration is manageable. The downside? It's basically JavaScript-only. Got Python microservices? Go fuck yourself.

Also, Vercel owns it now, so expect monetization to creep in. The remote caching is already a paid feature, and it's only a matter of time before more stuff goes behind the paywall.

Bazel can handle any language and any scale, but using it requires a PhD in build systems. I watched a team of maybe 20 engineers spend 6 months migrating to Bazel 6.2. It worked perfectly... until someone needed to add lodash as a dependency. That took 2 days of BUILD file archaeology because apparently rules_nodejs doesn't play nice with npm_install.

The documentation assumes you're Google. The error messages are written by people who hate other people. And if you think you're going to migrate off Bazel easily, think again. It's like Hotel California but for build systems.

Microservices: Death by a Thousand Cuts

The alternative is splitting everything into microservices, which trades one big problem for many small problems.

Each service needs its own CI/CD pipeline. That's 50 different ways your deploy can fail. Each service needs monitoring, logging, and alerting. Your operational overhead just went from "manageable" to "requires dedicated teams."

Want to rename a field in the User model? Hope you enjoy coordinating releases across 8 different teams with different sprint schedules. What used to be a 10-line find-and-replace is now a 3-month cross-team initiative with feature flags and backward compatibility shims.

But hey, when service A shits the bed, services B through Z keep working. That's something.

The Reality: Everyone Compromises

Most places end up with a hybrid approach because pure strategies are for people who don't have to maintain this garbage in production. Core platform stuff goes in the monorepo because you need atomic changes. Product features get their own repos because teams want autonomy.

The result? You get the complexity of both approaches and the benefits of neither. But at least it kind of works, and "kind of works" beats perfect architecture that never ships.

There's no right answer here, just trade-offs you can live with. Pick the one that makes you want to quit less and focus on problems your customers actually give a damn about.

Forget the benchmarks and case studies.

Here's what really happens when you try to scale development.

The Performance Lie

Those "7x performance improvements" numbers are complete bullshit. They're measuring the perfect case scenario on a clean machine with optimal configuration and zero actual complexity. In the real world, your monorepo build performance degrades faster than Java

Script frameworks become obsolete.

I've seen Nx builds start at 2 minutes and slowly creep up to 15 minutes over 6 months as the team added more apps and libraries. The distributed cache helps until it doesn't, and debugging why the cache missed for your specific change is its own special hell.

Microservices aren't faster either

• they're just differently slow. Instead of one 15-minute build, you get 8 different 3-minute builds that all need to pass before you can deploy anything meaningful. And they all fail at different times for different reasons.

The Hidden Costs Nobody Warns You About

Monorepo Reality Check

You will need at least 2 full-time engineers just to keep the build system working.

Not "improving" it or "optimizing" it

• just keeping it from falling apart.

When Nx 16.1 breaks your workspace (and it will), someone needs to spend 4 hours figuring out why buildable: true suddenly doesn't work.

When the TypeScript compiler dies with FATAL ERROR: Ineffective mark-compacts near heap limit, someone needs to bump --max-old-space-size to 8GB.

When developers can't figure out how to add lodash without breaking half the workspace, someone needs to write wiki page #47 that nobody will read.

The learning curve is brutal. I watched a team of experienced engineers spend 2 months just getting comfortable with Nx generators. Half the team never really figured it out and just copied configuration from other projects, hoping nothing would break.

Microservices Death Spiral

Microservices fail slowly, then all at once. Each service seems simple until you need to debug why users can't log in and the problem spans auth-service, user-service, session-service, and the API gateway across 3 different teams who all blame each other.

Your operational complexity explodes. You need service discovery, distributed tracing, circuit breakers, and a service mesh. Every service needs its own monitoring dashboard. Your on-call rotation becomes a game of "guess which service is broken now."

The worst part? Cross-service changes. That simple refactoring that would take 2 hours in a monorepo becomes a 3-sprint epic involving feature flags, backward compatibility, and coordination meetings.

When Each Approach Actually Works

Monorepos Work When:

You have a homogeneous tech stack and your team can dedicate significant resources to tooling.

If everyone's writing Type

Script React apps, Nx might actually help. If you have a mix of Node.js, Python, and Go services, good fucking luck.

You need atomic changes across multiple services. If your business logic is tightly coupled and you frequently need to change 5 different modules at once, the monorepo makes sense.

You have strong platform engineering. This is the big one

• if you can't dedicate 20% of your engineering capacity to build tooling, don't even fucking try. I'm serious.

Microservices Work When:

Your services have genuinely different requirements.

User authentication doesn't need the same infrastructure as real-time chat or batch data processing. Let teams optimize for their specific problems.

You have independent product lines. If the mobile team, web team, and data team rarely coordinate, don't force them into a shared build system.

You value team autonomy over consistency. Some teams want to use the latest React beta, others want to stick with Vue 2 forever. Microservices let them make their own bed and lie in it.

The Dirty Truth About Hybrid Approaches

Most companies end up with a hybrid approach, which sounds smart until you realize you now have all the complexity of both systems.

Your monorepo tools don't work well with external services. Your microservices can't easily share code with the monorepo. You end up with custom tooling to bridge the gap, and that custom tooling becomes its own maintenance burden.

But sometimes "works okay" beats "perfect in theory." If your hybrid approach ships software and doesn't make developers quit, you're ahead of most companies.

The Real Decision Framework

Stop overthinking this. Here's how to actually choose:

Go with monorepo tools if:

• Your codebase is mostly one language (JavaScript/TypeScript)
• You have 2+ engineers who actually enjoy build tooling
• Cross-service changes happen multiple times per week
• Your team can handle like 3 months of reduced velocity during migration

Go with microservices if:

• Your services have genuinely different operational requirements
• Teams work independently and don't coordinate much
• You're willing to invest in operational tooling (monitoring, tracing, etc.)
• You can live with the complexity of distributed systems

Stay with whatever you have if:

• It's currently working and not causing major pain
• You don't have dedicated platform engineering resources
• Your team is already stressed with product delivery
• You have bigger problems to solve

The best architecture is the one that lets your team ship features without wanting to quit. Everything else is just details.