There is a certain kernel of truth to it. I work at Google, and doing anything at all is a chore - it's almost as if we're back to programming with punch cards.
It's not surprising that Python doesn't work well in such a high-delay dev environment.
It's not surprising that Python doesn't work well in such a high-delay dev environment.
That's putting it nicely. Based on experience, I'd say it's arguing about preferences while demanding that code be coupled because "that's how we do things here".
> culture is far more like academia anyway
Academia is actually based on research and correctness to a much higher degree. The lack of focus on correctness in code worked on at Google is, honestly, appalling. Until, of course, you realize that all other FAANG employees still write loads of concurrency bugs and pronounce themselves gods for doing so.
That's certainly not been my experience (and I get the exact opposite impression from people involved in the formal readability process).
> Academia is actually based on research and correctness to a much higher degree.
This depends, greatly, on what part of academia you're in. In many ways, Google is much better about correctness than much of academia (reproducibility, for example, is often near trivial at Google but uncommon in most non-theoretical areas of academia).
> The lack of focus on correctness in code worked on at Google is, honestly, appaling
There are tradeoffs here. On the one hand, you have tens of thousands of engineers, you're not going to be able to enforce perfection by every single one with the tools available today with a reasonable cost. On the one hand, I see evidence that Google is willing to invest huge amounts into improving software correctness at the lowest levels (like proposing and upstreaming changes to languages to improve correctness-by-default).