>> don’t have all the fancy google tools or services
Hard to believe that all of the fancy google tools haven't been replicated in open source yet. Software people love writing tools to make writing software easier - what's up?
I haven't worked at Google. But I think that the level of infrastructure at a larger Tech company really shouldn't be disregarded. I've worked in a small <10 person shop, a large non-tech finance co, and a tech co. One really big difference is that the internal tooling, infrastructure, etc. are really well polished at a larger tech focused company compared to non-tech and small places. Even if there are a lot of open source tools, which may even be used at tech companies, when you do not have a team(s) who work full time integrating all of these tools, the developer infrastructure, CICD, etc. it is a big pain. And at smaller non-tech companies, debugging all of this stuff that Just Works^tm is a really big part of the job.
Not to mention when there's a problem, especially a SEV, you have oncalls and entire teams of people rushing to fix it, giving trackable status updates, responding directly to you, etc.
Compare that to posting on Stack Overflow and praying for a high quality response.
Hard to believe that all of the fancy google tools haven't been replicated in open source yet. Software people love writing tools to make writing software easier - what's up?