alt Hacker NewsI was responsible for getting the investment and (and pushing on turndowns) in getting Google to one IDE, and also worked at IBM for a few years. I also spent lots of time talking with my counterparts in other places.
So I know what others spend and were spendingin similar environments in terms of actual dollars, and where it roughly goes.
So let me say - it was not a small investment, in part because the all-in costs of engineers are very different. I'm really unsure why you would think otherwise.
Unlike others, Google is also remarkably good at quantifying the actual value something provides in developer productivity/etc. Most engineers handwave this tremendously. Google has an amazing amount of telemetry. So i laugh when you talk about "the leverage over developer productivity" because the vast majority of companies i've worked at or talked with have almost no useful idea about their developer productivity (IE can't even account for the majority of their developers time at work), or how to invest effectively to do something about it. They can often account for <30% of time developers are spending at work, etc.
As for perspectives - there is plenty of sentinment and other data. Cider is overall one of the top 5 most loved tools at Google, and had well over 90% developer satisfaction IIRC.
Oh so it's YOUR fault. ;)
Don't worry -- I came to love Cider for the simplicity. I tolerate Cider V, but its "anything" nature means it's not good at anything in particular. These days, I mostly use it to peek into what (Antigravity's internal equivalent) does.
I was in the Eclipse camp, prior to the IntelliJ reversal. At the time there were at least double the number of active daily users of Eclipse, Google had hired some original Eclipse devs who did an awesome job making Eclipse work at Google scale, and basically I was back to where I had been (in productivity) before joining Google.
The decision was made to go with Eclipse. Then it magically went into some sort of internal box/decision process, and came out IntelliJ instead. I've always thought this was because of a sufficiently highly placed Android person with a personal preference, but I could be 100% wrong.
This made me sad. I escalated internally, compiled all of the usage numbers, did feature comparisons on what actually worked in each IDE, to no avail. Near the end, Eclipse's C++ support and refactoring actually worked reasonably well on Blobstore, which was NOT a small thing.
IMO IntelliJ never worked very well in google3, and certainly didn't have anywhere near the level of fluidity and speed that Eclipse had (all the way back from its VisualAge Smalltalk roots -- something even most users of Eclipse never really understood or got into). That said, Eclipse just had the wrong architecture for a massive monorepo. It could be made to work (and it was), but it was never a good fit...and getting the upstream changes needed was apparently problematic.
Plain simple Cider was better (in my mind) than IntelliJ's broken functionality that worked in the outside world, but not in google3 (at least not on the code bases that I worked in).
Plain old Cider just kept adding smart features that solved problems and made it nicer. By the time Cider V was coming, it had big shoes to fill.