From someone who’s seen how the sausage gets made, I both agree and disagree. A lot of Google’s practices really are good software engineering practices - prov

From someone who’s seen how the sausage gets made, I both agree and disagree. A lot of Google’s practices really are good software engineering practices - provided you have the money to invest in replicating it to a high degree of quality, which could be substantial and better spent elsewhere. When you have one of the most lucrative business models of all time you definitely have the money to invest in trying to make it as stable to maintain and easy to add value onto as possible, so it was definitely worth it for Google in many cases, but each other company will have to determine the costs vs benefits themselves. Replicating Blaze and Forge seems really expensive and hard to get right (though it can be tremendously valuable for development on a large codebase). Postmortems, containerization, servers-as-cattle, gradual non-global releases… those aren’t as expensive to set up and have great cost/benefit ratios. It’d be stupid to not do these just because Google does them (and in some cases invented or popularized the practice).