This is a problem I constantly come across when trying to hire people coming from Netflix, Google, Facebook, Amazon and similar companies that have this "I'm the smartest vibe".

At one point in time, it was a good indicator of skill that they were coming from one of those places, that we could trust their technical knowledge as long as they left the place willingly and weren't fired from the place.

But some years ago it started to change and now we're seeing previously work experience at those places as something negative, as hires from those places tend to want to upend everything to something their previous company used to do, even though it wouldn't make any sense for the their new workplace to do.

And then constantly "scale" becomes an argument when the product they're building haven't even found a market fit yet. They're always jumping into this theoretical possible limits that we're nowhere near of hitting but want to solve everything upfront.

It's exhausting both for management and the rest of the team to have to deal with, so best just to avoid that class of developers as a whole.

I think this is true in some cases, but Google has been okay at adopting external vendors where internal tools aren't keeping up. And in some cases, folks actually hate the external replacement and miss the google-built tool. So YMMV.

Companies like FB, Google, etc are large enough and have specific enough needs that sometimes they really do have to build their own thing. Buck had to be built by Facebook because Bazel wasn't open source yet, and well that's one example of something from Google outclassing all the competition for organizations that need anything like it.

In re arrogant people, they exist at all organizations whether it's warranted or not. I wouldn't let a random peon at Google affect your perception of the organization. You'll see similar behavior from companies at all sizes so it's not really a telling signal.