I wonder if the well-documented nihism of Google, coupled with how all the marvellous internal Google tools seem to work a lot less well without their product teams running them, is secretly an employee retention strategy.
Feels like a stretch to me, I have to say. The only tool that comes to mind is Blaze/Bazel, which I haven't tried outside of Google, but the friction people experience is likely down to the fact that, outside of Google, you have to deal with a world that's more complicated than a single giant monorepo.
