The one thing that worries me about leaving Google is how much time I'd have to spend building hacked-together imitations of the infrastructure I'm used to using. It's not because I don't know how other things work, it's because I know how these things work and I like them better.

At least the build system was recently open-sourced, so I won't have to build that from scratch. But things like Borg and D are both elegant and easy to use, and I would hate to have to go back and care about deploying software or configuring RAID arrays again. Unfun and uninteresting. Totally solved at Google for the kinds of problems I work on.

For me - from the outside - the build-system and the trunk-based development is the single most important factor for an organization that scales. Yet I wonder why it is so hard to convince my co-workers .. any anecdotes about how it was started at Google and later at Twitter?

A lot of times that tech no one uses today becomes the industry standard tomorrow.

It's scary being at the bleeding edge.

I'm not sure that Google thinks of that as a problem. In fact, I'd argue a lot of the tech that many companies use nowadays exists because Google pioneered it.

I think that he's talking about the employee perspective, not the company perspective. Google's tech stack is mostly proprietary, which means you can't take your tech skills with you to a new employer.

...And I haven't found it to be a major problem, being an ex-Googler a little over a year out. Tech skills are easy to pick up on your own. My current startup is based on Node.js, a native Android client, and AWS; the one before it was Django & Heroku. Haven't tried looking for jobs yet - I made enough at Google to not have to worry about that for a while - but I occasionally get in-bound interest from big-name, fast-growing startups. Most clueful hiring managers look for experience with problems, not with solutions, and Google lets you face problems that the rest of the industry won't deal with for a while.

As a Googler I find it to be the most fun and most attractive part of the job. I'm not too worried about learning specific technologies. Learning the core fundamentals of how these technologies work is however critical. But since Google is (still nowadays) pioneering a lot of that, esp. in the distributed world, that's not really a problem either.

My fear would be related to not having things to put on my resume or being able to answer specific questions during interviews, but of course that's not remotely an issue for the specific case of ex-Google employees.

A lot of technologies ? No not even close. More like 3.

GFS, MapReduce, BigTable were the key Google inventions that became the sparks that ignited the modern day big data/analytics revolution.

There are plenty of other companies that also have tech that Google doesn't have or use too. Google has all these amazing tech, but I can assure you working at Google doesn't mean you will ever get to use it directly.

Exactly. Facebook and Yahoo have contributed equally as much to the technology landscape as Google has.

And unlike Google they actually make it available to the public and then follow it up with supporting the projects.

A lot of these things were originally developed at Google then spread to other companies (when employees moved etc.). So Google is contributing probably more, but not directly.