One things alluded to but not mentioned explicitly: many Googlers (especially in middle management roles) have work at Google all or almost all of their career. If you left university and went straight to Google, you might have a warped perception of the tech world and what's "normal". I think this contributes to the arrogant culture at Google because if you firmly believe that this company is the best of the best and you've never seen actual industry best practices, you might not even be aware of how weird and bad some of the internal processes and tools really are.