I was the maintainer of a third-party library used by thousands of dependent applications at Google. I have to admit, I still have not seen on the outside a system that allows me to change the version of numpy, and know that thousands of dependent applications either work or break, within an hour of making my change.
Being able to write and use a mapreduce with a high level of confidence that my code would continue to work years later was another nice benefit. MRs I wrote in the first year at Google still compiled and ran with minimal changes almost 10 years later(!) which is amazing given the amount of environmental change that occurred.
That said, somebody could still halt development across the company by changing and checking in a core file (like proto defs for websearch) without testing.
Whatever social system led to google3/borg and the amazing productivity associated with it, it was a special moment that hasn't been replicated many times.
Being able to write and use a mapreduce with a high level of confidence that my code would continue to work years later was another nice benefit. MRs I wrote in the first year at Google still compiled and ran with minimal changes almost 10 years later(!) which is amazing given the amount of environmental change that occurred.
That said, somebody could still halt development across the company by changing and checking in a core file (like proto defs for websearch) without testing.
Whatever social system led to google3/borg and the amazing productivity associated with it, it was a special moment that hasn't been replicated many times.