Absolutely disagree, to the maximum possible extent. My entire job at Google was to find and fix inefficiency in other people’s projects. I didn’t own any projects! But I submitted changes to foreign code daily and I rarely got any kind of pushback.

Working on shared code is so easy at Google because they have a fantastic cross-referenced code browser and search engine, ways to inspect production jobs and configs that anyone can access, and everything is open and visible.

By contrast the other large publicly-traded cloud company where I now work has the opposite culture: no code search worth using, “why are you touching my project?” culture, not enough tests to give anyone confidence in a change. The polar opposite of Google.