[shadowmatter]

As another year ex-Googler, I'd say this is BS. Everything that superseded the "gconfig" days was pretty amazing, and IIRC the team behind it in NY did quite well for themselves. Steve Yegge wrote GROK, which is an internal tool, and I'm pretty sure no one around here looks down on him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTJs-0EInW8

[magicalist]

Steve Yegge is probably a better example, but another that comes to mind is that Guido wrote the code review system there. He left for dropbox, but he was at Google for years, so clearly something was worth the 50% or whatever of his time left over from python dictatorship duties.

In an earlier comment, OP mentions leaving Google before Go was released, which was quite a while ago now, so not sure why he felt the need to chime in. He just sounds like he wanted to be an asshole, honestly.

[weareconvo]

I think the fact that I worked there for over 5 and a half years should afford my opinion a bit more weight, but as I despise the Argument By Authority fallacy, I'll concede that any other Xoogler should be able to chime in and contradict me here.

[nostrademons]

Current Googler here. When did you leave? A previous comment of yours says that it was before Go was released, which was in 2009.

Internal tools & developer infrastructure have gotten noticeably better since 2011, which was when Ms. Meckfessel took over. As engineers, we routinely use tools that were dismissed as impossible when I joined in 2009. If you're thinking about the gconfig/mk-debug days, the developer experience is orders of magnitude better now.