Also...these things tend to have fuckin terrible documentation. Good luck figuring any of this out. And you can't google it and your AI is just as lost as you
- source code in database: yes
- own IDE for questionable reasons: you bet!
- custom table objects: we got your back.
- strange forks of common python libraries: would you like warnings with that?
It seems like any giant organization eventually develops its own software center of gravity.
The only real difference there (although it is a significant one) is that most of those internal Google tools tended to be very good, often ahead of the external state-of-the-art. That's a very different feeling to a baroque old stack inside a bank somewhere. Maybe the external world has caught up on a bunch of them more recently though which would start to change that.
I convinced my boss to hire an intern for the summer to do this. They said: "wouldn't internship projects that involved actual coding be more attractive?"
I replied: "Well, they'll be having to do a lot of experimenting to figure things out..."