Except when your team wanted to initially onboard with GOOPS and your request sat in Buganizer for 2 weeks waiting for someone to triage. Uh oh — we're turning down this service next quarter, you will need to go start this onboarding process again with its replacement.

Or when you needed quota in a cell where your product area didn't have Flex. Maybe you can set up a VC with your PARM? Does next week work for your launch plan? Hopefully they can do something for you!

Or when your logs access request sat in GUTS for a month because both of the approvers were on vacation and no, there's not an escalation path.

Or when you needed to change a firewall rule for a project your team inherited which for some reason runs on GCE. Make sure you bring your Ariane link when you open your request. Have ISE reviewed your code? No? ISE currently have a quarter-long backlog, so we're not sure we can grant your firewall exception.

None of these examples are contrived; the weight of the operational bureaucracy is staggering. It may well be that this stuff is felt more on the SRE/Security side around production launches than on the SWE side for experimentation or iterative development, but I struggle with the idea that Google is nimble.