no other activity i know teaches patience quite as well as building Android.
you learn to enjoy the process; embrace the failures; let go of your disk space...
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I guessing Google gives their developers personal data centres to build on.
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I believe they use the cloud build farm instead of their personal machines; third party AOSP build experience must be quite unlike first party AOSP build experience
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Yea, from what I know if Chrome's build process is similar. Something along the lines of "Start at 1000 CPUs and scale up"
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"the recommended first step to build Chromium is to become a Google employee but some alternative workarounds are available if that's not practical"
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A workstation with 24-64 cores and a bunch of memory to go along with that can churn out clean builds quite quickly. For development, you're generally doing incremental builds where not much has to be rebuilt. It's quite normal to have 20 minute clean builds and 30s incremental.
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For development with Chromium, you generally do component builds without LTO.
For AOSP, you don't spend the time assembling the target files package and then turning that into signed factory images and update packages. You can also avoid having to flash images for most dev work.
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In a userdebug build, it's possible to leave the device unlocked, disabled dm-verity and use adb sync to sync file changes which essentially corrupts the OS images i.e. verified boot won't pass but it just doesn't matter for most kinds of development work.
For kernel development with a device that's left unlocked, it can just be booted via fastboot instead of flashing it persistently. You do sometimes need to actually flash stuff for development and sometimes you do really need to be testing proper release builds for production.
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The worst thing I deal with is building the Linux kernel with full LTO+CFI because it literally uses 40GB of memory at peak. I sometimes forget how bad it is and start a few kernel builds in parallel instead of serially and then half of them get killed by the OOM killer.
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