As someone who left in 2021: - OWNERS is absolutely a necessary and important thing, and yes it sucked when it made finding an approver hard, but the point of

As someone who left in 2021: - OWNERS is absolutely a necessary and important thing, and yes it sucked when it made finding an approver hard, but the point of OWNERS was to optimize for _local_ ownership. (For non-Google folks: think CODEOWNERS files, but hierarchical/recursive, so approvers in /OWNERS, a/OWNERS, a/b/OWNERS, and a/b/c/OWNERS can approve changes anywhere in a/b/c/...) - I joined in 2017 and it never took 18 months to get readability. If it took you 18 months, it was because you spent 2 weeks writing code in one of those languages and then didn't keep it up. I worked through the stats on this too- by the time I left in 2021, there was virtually no delay to enter the readability process for Java and it was maybe a few weeks for Python. > There was no way to update every call site of your library in an efficient way. Does FB have something better here? G had sufficiently many tools for this, IMO: csearch+grep+sed for the easy changes, Refaster/clang-tidy for more complex stuff (admittedly C++ AST matchers are black magic that few people on even the C++ teams understood). Although I do wish I had known about Comby before I'd left. Rosie - the tool for executing large-scale changes, i.e. if you made a change to 1K+ files (often 10K+ or 100K+), you needed a way to break the change up into multiple PRs - was also an absolutely critical part of this. I never found the approval process Byzantine - undocumented, perhaps, but remarkably streamlined considering that LSCs meant making simultaneous changes to code in Ads, Android, Cloud, Geo, Search, Technical Infrastructure, YouTube, or however Google breaks down the engineering these days.