Googler here, but opinion is my own. Google's problem is that we have too many powerful internal engineering tools, many of which overlap in functionality, and

Googler here, but opinion is my own. Google's problem is that we have too many powerful internal engineering tools, many of which overlap in functionality, and so often its hard to know at first which one to use to solve a problem. Thankfully, there is nearly always an overlap period when one solution gets deprecated and the replacement is launched. The COVID19 office shutdown has really focused attention on our internal IT tools (most of which are also offered externally). So far, they've worked pretty great, in no small part because things like BeyondCorp [1] were designed from the start for distributed workforces in zero-trust security environments. It wasn't always like this though. Corp-Eng, as it's called at Google was for a long time seen as a dead end career-wise - disconnected from Google's marquee products. However, a number of developments, including the rise of the enterprise and cloud computing businesses, have bolstered its internal importance, and with that have brought excitement and talent to the organization. It's now an important source of product feature ideas that eventually make their way to customers. That said, a lot of things not core to Google's problem spaces do get solved with outside vendors' software, and some of that software is great. For example, I just used a site licensed version of the Chrome ScreenCastify [2] extension to make a video demonstrating a feature I'm developing. It worked perfectly. 1. https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp 2. https://www.screencastify.com/ https://www.screencastify.com/