Yes, Critique (and Gerritt) is a good tool. Yes, Googlers tend to behave well in code reviews and conduct them decently, but..
The reality is that this kind of survey is a) self-selecting for the people who adapted well to Google's process, and b) not really measuring for productivity, just satisfaction with tools and some aspects of the (assumed given) process.
What I personally found is that Google is the kind of place where you can only truly be productive if you have the kind of brain that can fork off N work tasks at once and then fork/join on all of them.
If you're the kind of person that does better when going down the whole mineshaft on one problem at a time, you'll be screwed. Because you'll be constantly spending the bulk of your time sitting waiting for review approvals, or getting your account added into some ACL somewhere, or getting sign-off on a PRD or design doc, launch / security approval, or some other form of coworker approval. The only way to make progress is to do a bunch of those kinds of things at once and juggle between them.
After 10 years of battling it, I realized it's not for me, no matter the $$.
(There are some other things that Google does exceptionally smartly, though. The monorepo and the way they handle third party deps [check them in and only allow 1 version for whole company]) I think is one. Both of these things seem crazy at first, but they are amazing at minimizing whole classes of complexity around versioning and dependencies that add mostly needless overhead to the job of engineers)
The reality is that this kind of survey is a) self-selecting for the people who adapted well to Google's process, and b) not really measuring for productivity, just satisfaction with tools and some aspects of the (assumed given) process.
What I personally found is that Google is the kind of place where you can only truly be productive if you have the kind of brain that can fork off N work tasks at once and then fork/join on all of them.
If you're the kind of person that does better when going down the whole mineshaft on one problem at a time, you'll be screwed. Because you'll be constantly spending the bulk of your time sitting waiting for review approvals, or getting your account added into some ACL somewhere, or getting sign-off on a PRD or design doc, launch / security approval, or some other form of coworker approval. The only way to make progress is to do a bunch of those kinds of things at once and juggle between them.
After 10 years of battling it, I realized it's not for me, no matter the $$.
(There are some other things that Google does exceptionally smartly, though. The monorepo and the way they handle third party deps [check them in and only allow 1 version for whole company]) I think is one. Both of these things seem crazy at first, but they are amazing at minimizing whole classes of complexity around versioning and dependencies that add mostly needless overhead to the job of engineers)