"were not google" is usually good for things where people are using cargo cult. I saw at one company that went open floor plan because google did it. No one w

"were not google" is usually good for things where people are using cargo cult. I saw at one company that went open floor plan because google did it. No one was happy about that. Retention became very low and everyone bailed out. Emulating google does not fix process and management issues. As what may be at google for a good reason may be an utter failure at another company. There are things all shops can adopt that google does that would help them. But many of the ones I have seen adopted were little more than showy garbage instead of the things that would actually help. Also sometimes you just need a simple tool to get something done. As engineers we like to build things so sometimes we make it way more complex than it really needs to be. For someone like google that may just be fine to do. For others a minimum viable product may be in order. Do not worry about optimizing for the 3 million user per day case when you have 10 total users a month. Add logging and keep an eye on it. Then worry if you need to scale. As building good scale takes time and thought. Many times you do not need that at all. As your company/group grows you will take on more and more of the things 'google does' because you will need to, or you will go nuts chasing everything. You could probably even make stages out of the different times to do/evaluate things. To do it early could actually harm what you are doing. You need to evaluate what you are doing and why. Just copying someone else does not always lead to a good outcome and you could be wasting effort when you could be making product.