That hasn't been my experience in a decade in the industry. I've never worked at a company with a single person who has worked at any of the big silicon valley

That hasn't been my experience in a decade in the industry. I've never worked at a company with a single person who has worked at any of the big silicon valley tech companies. But I've seen people choose technologies, tools, designs, and processes because that's what company X uses. None of the companies I've worked at have been even a tenth of the size of Google or Facebook. None of the companies has had one one hundredth of the amount of activity in their repositories that you'd find in the Linux kernel.