Then why do you often need external readability reviewers, especially if you or your team don't contribute to a codebase frequently? Having humans judge other humans' style is a given; it is part of the PR process. But why do you _also_ need someone with a readability rating as opposed to a code owner?
Note: I'm not a Googler nor a Xoogler, but my partner worked at Google for some years and so I've heard her complain a lot about Google and readability.
> But why do you _also_ need someone with a readability rating as opposed to a code owner
FWIW, these can be the same person - if the have appropriate readabilities. The problem is that it's not easy to get readability in the first place, so occasionally teams have to look for people outside.
Right but the fact that these are two separate roles strikes me both as bureaucratic overhead and a fundamental lack of trust in individual engineers. If I were approached to enact something like readability, I would veto it immediately. We hire engineers because we trust them. Part of that trust means that engineers occasionally wade into codebases they don't understand in languages they don't know and need to make contributions, but we trust them to not make a mess. Do some of them make messes? Undoubtedly. Is the magnitude of the mess, multiplied by the number of engineers, worth the creation of an entire readability certification process? I don't think so.
> Is the magnitude of the mess, multiplied by the number of engineers, worth the creation of an entire readability certification process? I don't think so.
And that's an acceptable trade-off for a different sized company. Google arguably has the biggest centralised codebase in the world, and simply has different requirements.
As other have said, most of the overhead is from attaining readability, not the requirement itself.
> And that's an acceptable trade-off for a different sized company. Google arguably has the biggest centralised codebase in the world, and simply has different requirements.
AWS does not operate this way nor do many CDNs operate this way nor do ISPs operate this way. There's other high scale businesses out there. Google isn't the only one. Using Google's scale to justify business practices is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> AWS does not operate this way nor do many CDNs operate this way nor do ISPs operate this way.
I'm not denying that, but all the same, we're not talking about thousands of separate codebases. It's a single monorepo codebase with consistent styling, the advantage being that people can switch teams or contribute to other Google software under the same style guide.
The overhead isn't a bug, it's a core feature as consistent style makes it that much easier to switch teams.
Note: I'm not a Googler nor a Xoogler, but my partner worked at Google for some years and so I've heard her complain a lot about Google and readability.