I've been around the programming block a few times myself and inherited some perfectly horrible code, and his list of cons makes me shudder. But people differ. I've (purposefully) worked at smaller companies where I had more influence over the technical direction. I think a good amount of his cons list come from the size of Google, and all that large size brings with it. Many of those things are probably needed in a large enough company, to prevent the very things you seem to think they'd bring (Daily WTF time!) But in a small company with decent people, those rules and attitudes would be overly restrictive.