I’ve not worked there but I’ve worked with many exgooglers. They tend to think Google * is the best in the world and they created it before anyone else and everyone else with similar capabilities copied them, and that Googlers are smarter. However ever company of their size and technical complexity has built almost exactly the same tooling and processes, but don’t carry the same attitude around. At a certain point I’ve learned to smile and nod as they explain and take credit for things I’ve developed myself at other FAANG and adjacent highly technical megacorps. The final thing of note is they seem to be unable to replicate their magic outside of Google, and blame the org they’re now in for being deficient in some way for that. “At Google we had X and didn’t have to worry about Y, without Y we can’t do X,” where Y is some nebulous qualitative feature of google culture. After I finish smiling and nodding I just go build X.

N.b., I’m not saying nosefrog is this person, or even everyone at google or ex-google is like this. This was just my experience working with senior principal or other very senior engineering staff.

Great comment. Google and others blazed a trail, but by 2010 you could find similar, often specialized tooling and practices emerging at most Fortune 500 tech companies.

Today you can almost universally get a better off-the-shelf solution with a SaaS product than what Googlers are able to access internally.