> individual teams were expressly forbidden from creating their own templates. Just want to underscore what others are saying, that this is not true and was no

> individual teams were expressly forbidden from creating their own templates. Just want to underscore what others are saying, that this is not true and was not true during the time you claimed to work there. I was at Google 2014-2016 and I'm there now. Templates are common and not banned at all. I committed template-heavy non-metaprogramming code to google3 in 2014 and also throughout this year. I have never had C++ readability. "Template Metaprogramming" is soft-banned in non-library code, meaning that it is disallowed if the readability reviewer looking at your code decides that what you are doing is "metaprogramming". There are other style guides that apply to small subsets of google3, some of which forbid certain kinds of template constructions (variadic, SFINAE, etc). Maybe you're thinking of one of those? I'm not aware of any that forbid all templates.