> Separating these two out, even if one person may fulfill two roles, IMO adds to bureaucracy that I don't care for. Ramping up onto a new language sounds like a pretty fraught experience if nobody on your team has readability and the service you're contributing doesn't have a member who has the time to actually work with you, especially if your work is not relevant to theirs. They even touched upon this in the linked video. The whole idea that you can enter a bureaucratic catch-22 at a company seems like an anti-pattern to me, a moment to stop and think; a "modern" engineering organization should try its utmost to accelerate development, with only as many checks as needed for safety and no more.

Keep in mind this video is ten years old. While yes, trying to write something from scratch in a language no one on your team has any experience in can be fraught (although this raises other questions: what exactly are you doing, in every case I've used a new lang, my team has been able to find people to review if needed), even in that case, the organization has help for you (see again my prior comment about "donating" readability, and my understanding is that the readability granting process actively prioritizes people who "need" the readability because they have few potential reviewers).

> That's what I mean by bureaucracy. Even having "another eye" on the code should work. Having a certification process for readability is even more bureaucracy.

I think initially the primary driver of readability is C++ (but Java + Guice also...needs it). Take a look at https://abseil.io/tips/. That's 70 tips, which is around a third of the internal ones. I have C++ readability and have internalized, some of those. The readability granting process ensures your code is reviewed by someone who knows all (or nearly all) of those tips, and will recognize when you're doing wrong things in your code and help explain how or why you can improve. When I personally went through the C++ readability process, I got mentorship on how to fix bugs in my code, some of which a peer on my team would have caught, and some of which they wouldn't have. I can now recognize those bug prone patterns (which are hard to lint for, in my case they mostly had to do with parallelism) and know about tools to debug them (msan and asan, which an experienced C++ user should know, but on my team of people who had basically no C++ experience at Google? Nah).

That follows into other languages. Being granted readability means you have a familiarity with the language that suggests you'll be able to effectively mentor others and not mislead them. You don't have that otherwise.

> Unless you have engineers constantly cross-cutting across the company, most engineers learn the style guidelines of a team/product/service by ramping up on the team.

Google uses a single repo and builds stuff from HEAD. This has up- and downsides, but one of the upsides is that its very easy to investigate unusual behavior in your dependencies. I was doing something similar just this week, and fixed obscure bugs in like 7 other teams tools that were causing downstream problems that those teams weren't aware of. No bureaucracy. I found the bug, fixed them, and sent the change to the owning team. Imagine other situations, where I'd need to maintain a fork, or file a bug to have them fix it, or coordinate an update with them.

You'll pay the cost no matter what, choosing to do so in a way that also provides value and mentorship makes a lot of sense to me.

> But promos drive _so much_ of the company culture, at least from what my partner tells me. And the video in the OP certainly makes it sound like Google has lots of bureaucracy, though I'm not sure how many of the requirements outlined in the video were there for hyperbole or not.

I mean the entire thing is tongue in cheek and again is a decade old. I joined Google ~5 years ago, and even then most of the problems with resource acquisition were solved ("flex") and borgmon and its associated readability were gone, replaced with monarch, which is centralized and used a python-based (though still admittedly arcane) query language that doesn't require readability or managing your own instance. And since then things have gotten even more turnkey for any service that's...reasonably shaped. And, well, the level to which promo drives company culture is consistently overstated (at least in some ways).