Seems rather bizarre to me, though it could make sense for some non-technical roles. For developers, seems a bit impractical; much of language documentation is online and odd errors, common and esoteric, are frequently completely absent from docs. This seems likely to require devs to either use unauthorized devices or waste time digging through source (possibly for the programming language itself) to figure things out.

However, the remark about root access makes me hope that there are not people logging into systems at Google as root. A sudoer, sure, but root is a big no-no.