[marssaxman]

I had a bad time at Google and was glad to leave, but wow did I ever miss that culture of commitment to dev process improvement and investment in tooling. The next startup I joined was kind of a shocking letdown. It became clear pretty early on that nobody else there had ever seen anything like the systems at Google, couldn't imagine why they might be worth investing in, and therefore the level of engineering chaos we wasted so much time struggling with was going to be permanent.

The startup I'm working for now is roughly half ex-googlers, so it is a different story. Of course we can't afford Google level infrastructure, but there is at least a strong cultural value around internal tooling, and a belief that issues with repetitive or error-prone tasks are problems with systems, not the people trying to use them.