I used to work at Google, and I find the tooling much better on the outside. Heroku is much better than Google's deployment tool; Github is much better than their review tool.

The only things I miss are the snacks and the searchable codebase

I did a short contract at Amazon (not AWS) and I couldn't get away fast enough. What a rat's nest.

> and the searchable codebase

Do you mean that you'd search Google's entire codebase monorepo for code examples, or that there was a better, searchable code snippet tool internally?

> Do you mean that you'd search Google's entire codebase monorepo for code examples

As another former Googler, yes, searching the entire monorepo was a frequent occurrence. Internal code search is pretty good (it's a search company, after all) but I have to say that I don't miss it so much now that Sourcegraph exists.

Not sure about google, but most of the big tech companies have a code browser website with a search feature that shows the most "relevant" repositories first in the search results. For example, repositories that people in your team or org have recently modified will show up near the top of the results.

And it's totally reasonable that this isn't common place. The team I'm with now has been spending a lot of our spare time at work trying to get a suite of tools built out to make things like logging, message publishing, etc. spun up easily. It is very painful. The simple case is pretty simple, but if you add any complexity to it you're in for a world of pain.

Not sure what stack you're using, but Azure Application Insights is very nice for logging. And they have lots of tools for what you're mentioning (but you have to pay for them). If not, maybe you do have to build them (and it might be monetizable even!)

it doesn't show up on the books. All companies over optimise for things they measure and under optimise for things they don't. Nobody has a reliable measure for development productivity so it oft doesn't receive the love it deserves.

Easier said than done even if you _do_ get the time to invest into it.

We're using Azure at my current workplace, and the amount of legwork you can get done is pretty amazing (as long as you're willing to pay for it). We have an ARM template to set up environments, deployment is painless with Azure DevOps, etc.

Pro tip: Building repeatable and distributable tooling patterns is a great way to break into client sites as a consultant