I have no reason to make this up :-/ I comment very infrequently, but only use throwaway accounts as a personal policy based in part on HN-the-community's resp

I have no reason to make this up :-/ I comment very infrequently, but only use throwaway accounts as a personal policy based in part on HN-the-community's response to my opinions and HN-the-website's aggressive response to downvotes. (I'm actually re-using a previous throwaway because my last throwaway was autodead-on-arrival. Flagged IP maybe?) Anonymity is not really the point; In fact, there are HN members who might figure out my identity simply because they were directly involved in these experiences. The SRE anecdote may seem unbelievable, but why would this have been the case with multiple Google SREs? I did not imply that their work at Google consists of waving a magic wand and things getting done; it's more likely that the basic building blocks of Google's infrastructure are very powerful, and you don't have to worry about a bunch of things that other SREs have to. "Nice libraries and tools" is an understatement. Seems it's not only that they are reliant on $ProprietaryTechnologyG, they could not explain how $ProprietaryTechnologyG works or even describe alternative methods they'd use instead. On the other hand, it is possible that it's only been the lesser SREs that have been interviewing around. Also: The two Googlers I talked about (one of whom has been there longer than you, if I remember your HN comment history correctly), are doing very interesting work, and are very happy at their jobs. As a disclaimer, I know one well and the other I met only once. Nonetheless, they, in no unclear terms, said what I paraphrased and quoted above. I didn't mean to imply that the stack was made so huge to keep unhappy employees in. In fact, I did not mean to imply any intent at all. However, as you said, since employees are not forced to understand it, most of them don't, and this becomes just another factor to consider when thinking of changing jobs. Not knowing the whole stack is perfectly fine, but when critical pieces have no comparable equivalent in the outside world, your skills become less transferable. (Plus, you might not feel like leaving all that good stuff behind!) As I said in another comment upthread, the "proprietary stack" aspect at Google seems to be more pronounced than at other companies like Microsoft. I mean, come on, it's a commonly accepted fact that it takes a year to become productive after you start at Google. What reasonable conclusion about the stack can one draw from that?