Oh boy.
So, to start, we have done scientific studies about the costs and benefits of readability (as codified circa 2018, since that was when the last study was).
It was studied for multiple programming languages Google uses.
It was done, at my request, by the engineering productivity research team, who are experts in this kind of research - you can find public papers they publish[1].
For background: I was the person responsible for production programming languages, and I did this precisely because i did not feel at the time there were recent good studies as to whether readability was really worth the cost.
The answer is "yes, it is".
There is an upfront cost, but readability has a meaningful and net positive effect on engineering velocity.
It is large enough to make the cost back quite quickly.
One could go down the rabbit hole of seeing whether you improve (or make worse) the numbers by changing various parts of the style guides, but like I said, what is there now, has in fact been studied scientifically.
Honestly, i'm not sure why you think it wouldn't be. You come off as a little immature when you sort of just assume people have no idea what they are doing and don't think these things through. You are talking about a company with 60k+ engineers. Every hour of all-engineer time you waste is equivalent to having ~30 SWE do nothing for a year.
Maybe there are companies happy to do that. I worked at IBM for a few years when i was much younger ;). All I can say is that as long as i'm involved in developer tools at Google, i'm gonna try not to waste my customers time.
[1] I say this in the hopes you don't go making assumptions about whether the studies were done properly. They were properly controlled for tenure, number of reviews, change size, etc.
I'd love to see the research here. Because searching the software engineering Google papers from 2021-2021, the only somewhat relevant papers I found were case studies (such as [1] and [2]), which were based on Googlers' perception of their own processes. While self-perception can indeed by used to measure efficacy, there's a reason why it's used with great caution in surveys. I'll be honest, I have a hard time believing in readability myself.
We have never published the readability research. I could look into doing so, but it is awfully Google specific. Trying to come up with something generally applicable would be a very different project
It was studied for multiple programming languages Google uses.
It was done, at my request, by the engineering productivity research team, who are experts in this kind of research - you can find public papers they publish[1].
For background: I was the person responsible for production programming languages, and I did this precisely because i did not feel at the time there were recent good studies as to whether readability was really worth the cost.
The answer is "yes, it is".
There is an upfront cost, but readability has a meaningful and net positive effect on engineering velocity.
It is large enough to make the cost back quite quickly.
One could go down the rabbit hole of seeing whether you improve (or make worse) the numbers by changing various parts of the style guides, but like I said, what is there now, has in fact been studied scientifically.
Honestly, i'm not sure why you think it wouldn't be. You come off as a little immature when you sort of just assume people have no idea what they are doing and don't think these things through. You are talking about a company with 60k+ engineers. Every hour of all-engineer time you waste is equivalent to having ~30 SWE do nothing for a year.
Maybe there are companies happy to do that. I worked at IBM for a few years when i was much younger ;). All I can say is that as long as i'm involved in developer tools at Google, i'm gonna try not to waste my customers time.
[1] I say this in the hopes you don't go making assumptions about whether the studies were done properly. They were properly controlled for tenure, number of reviews, change size, etc.