Most sysadmins on the market primarily have worked in manners and tooling hardly different between cost and revenue centers, and for Google they needed admins t

Most sysadmins on the market primarily have worked in manners and tooling hardly different between cost and revenue centers, and for Google they needed admins that are actually knowledgeable about software engineering to make them effective in a revenue center. It's laughable what kind of tools were written for enterprise systems back in the late 90s, so it's no surprise that absolutely none of them would meet Google's rate of growth requirements either. Furthermore, given the licensing patterns of most enterprise software suites, it'd potentially become cost prohibitive to deploy COTS ops software at Google scale anyway even with Google scale money. There's obviously still some cost centers to big tech companies (Facebook has contract positions open for doing service desk customizations last I checked) but custom tooling everywhere makes sense when you have justifiable reasons that nobody will be able to serve your needs besides yourself.