It is not practical to compare research or open source development to working at Google. You can definitely prioritize excellence in development, but only with

It is not practical to compare research or open source development to working at Google. You can definitely prioritize excellence in development, but only within the scale of a few humans. You cannot research what it is like to work at scale. Scale of hosts, requests, code, people, money. It's an experience to itself. It's always funny to "break" open source tools people rave about. Most recently elasticsearch is barely coping with some of my teams volumes and we have to do some really tricky distributed computing stuff to workaround and keep it happy. Mind you, like a Honda Civic, it is an amazing tool, and works brilliantly for most almost all uses, but at certain scale you need a Ferrari and that isn't something you can get anywhere but big companies. And when you learn by designing and debugging a Ferrari, everything else becomes trivial very quickly.