A lot of your perspective seems to be the result of a very strange work situation. If you regularly need people on the other side of the world to review complex

A lot of your perspective seems to be the result of a very strange work situation. If you regularly need people on the other side of the world to review complex changes, then your team shouldn't have an ocean between its halves. That being said: 1. Given that OWNERS approval must come from your own team, yes, your team dictates many of the code expectations. I'm not sure how this was ever not the case, unless you're arguing that teams should be exempt from readability, in which case my rebuttal is that although people gripe about it a lot, the vast majority agree on its utility after they go through the process. (Rereading your comment it sounds like you had difficulty getting Java approvals, and today there is a system where you can request a review from the pool of Java readability approvers at Google, and the turnaround tends to be pretty good, generally within a few hours.) 2. Absolutely not. If anything those need to be more careful to make sure nothing's lost in communication. 3. See 1. This is also driven by general test coverage and design processes, as well as the ability to define custom presubmit checks on a path-by-path basis.