> Many years ago, I did a brief stint at Google. A lot has changed since then, but even that brief exposure to Google's internal developer tools left a lasting impression on me.
Perhaps the operative phrase being "Many years ago". I currently work at Google, previously I worked at Square. Of the two, I generally prefer the OSS and off-the-shelf tooling at Square. Some things really are better at Google (code search and Blaze are definitely a big improvement over what we had), but many of our monitoring and CI tools feel antiquated and cluttered with inscrutable debris. Or take Gerrit, where each change has 3 different IDs and the developers decided that every workflow status should be expressed as an integer in the range [-2, 2] for some reason [1].
They were probably amazing (and much simpler) tools back in the day, but the world has moved and we're somewhat constrained by what's familiar.
Perhaps the operative phrase being "Many years ago". I currently work at Google, previously I worked at Square. Of the two, I generally prefer the OSS and off-the-shelf tooling at Square. Some things really are better at Google (code search and Blaze are definitely a big improvement over what we had), but many of our monitoring and CI tools feel antiquated and cluttered with inscrutable debris. Or take Gerrit, where each change has 3 different IDs and the developers decided that every workflow status should be expressed as an integer in the range [-2, 2] for some reason [1].
They were probably amazing (and much simpler) tools back in the day, but the world has moved and we're somewhat constrained by what's familiar.
[1]: https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/images/...