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Comment by 18nleung | Hacker News Reader

I interned at a FAANG last summer (Google) and I was blown away at how good the in-house tooling was (including the in-house IDE).

Everything was seamless - I'd log in, tap my security key, and instantly have access to pretty much the entire monorepo and the rest of the production + deploy systems. All of the internal tools integrated with each other -- for instance, I could create a CL (i.e. a pull request) and then fix issues raised by the CI system, entirely from the IDE.

"Owning the stack" completely in-house also extended to hardware -- all of my builds happened inside Google datacenters too (not on my machine), and the development box they provided me was a Chromebook.

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Nice to see a comment like this, I feel the same way. Google is the exception to all these other comments. The tools available to Google engineers make working outside Google feel painful and inefficient by comparison even with their unfettered access to all the third-party tooling.

It’s so good that it would actually be a factor if I were ever considering working somewhere else. Getting to work with Google’s in-house dev tooling is probably worth 15-20k to me. A lot more than 20k if the other company has a reputation for horrible tooling.

A company isn't going to pay you more to be less productive.

To fix the tooling? Maybe..

This is in contrast to Apple's internal software systems, at least if recent reports seem to be accurate; aside from (I assume Xcode), it seems the business-ey enterprise stuff is outsourced to contractors and software consulting firms and is a giant mess...

Granted, their DNA is still in hardware/devices/OS level stuff versus "services" despite all they claim to be, but how much more quickly could they move if they "owned more" of their stack?

I’ve heard similar stories about working at Sun back in the day. It was magical, supposedly.

Sun didn't have a monorepo -- at least not 1998 through the acquisition. Each org of a given size (Solaris os/net, install, etc) had its own separate island of source with its own build and test systems.

I guess my comment wasn’t clear. Talking about how you could just grab a random terminal with your smart card at Sun, and get work done. True at Google, true at Sun back in the day, not true at most places.

Yeah, stuff like this is one of my chief reasons I want to start working at a "top tech company". Just an overall higher level of tech competency.

You don't want to?

Typo, lol. Should have been "start". Or I may have been typing "stop working at a non-tech company" before my train of thought ran away.

Ah, I remember when the in-house IDE first came out, and it was considered a toy compared to vim/emacs. It has come a long way since then.

That said, I'm also looking forward to "VSCode front-end in the browser" becoming ubiquitous. I remember using Visual Studio back in my first job in high school, and Intellisense made coding so much more... explorable and approachable.

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