| I think I have heard similar things from other googlers and I think there might be two factors on why I think this: - I worked on Google Assistant which was responsible for integrating many services. This meant I had to work with other peoples code way more regularly that many at google. - I moved from FB to google - I'm not really sure how many people have had this experience. I think many of my colleagues at google found it surprising how many of the things they thought were unique to google actually also existed at FB. At the end of the day, any of these processes have pros/cons but I think the cruft of having APIs that are a couple steps harder to evolve due to finding Readability/Owners for everything you touch just makes things slightly less cohesive and a trickier place to have a "good" codebase. When I worked at FB, I would frequently rebase my code on Monday and find that, for example, the React framework authors or another smaller infra team had improved the API and had changed *every* callsite in the codebase to be improved. This type of iteration was possible in certain situations but was just much less common at google than at fb. |
Google workers are groomed to believe Google is the best, and hence they are too. A corollary of that, then, is that nobody else has it that good, when in fact, others sometimes have it better.