The biggest difference is that the software I keep running in production is 100% made in-house. Previously, I was running a system built on top of open-source s

The biggest difference is that the software I keep running in production is 100% made in-house. Previously, I was running a system built on top of open-source software (Hadoop and Kafka, in particular). It has a lot of benefits: * we have an influence on the priorities of the project, and make sure our issues are prioritized. You can't be sure of the evolution of an open-source project. * continuous rollouts. In my previous job each major version bump of Kafka or Hadoop could become a complex migration to plan a long time in advance. Now, we still have migrations to do, but often the scope is smaller and the transition smoother. * strong culture and policies. We hold ourselves accountable. In my previous job, we would often mitigate incidents and forget about them, not write the post mortem or really root cause the incident. Usually because we knew/believed it would not be solved anytime soon (conflicting priorities, or whatever else). I've never seen an incident swept under the rug at Google.