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Software Engineering Insights from 10 Years at Google

addyosmani.com

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Re: Software Engineering Insights from 10 Years at Google

#51

Post by klodolph »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #40
gmiller123456 wrote: post #20

Is there any evidence that Google is actually better at software engineering than other companies? IMHO, it seems they have enough money to deliberately do things inefficiently which would kill a smaller company, but Google can manage to succeed through brute force. Honestly I think the better example would be from a tiny company that can't afford to do things wrong.

Depends what you mean by "better at software engineering". What Google seems to do really well is building robust systems at a scale that pushes the limits of what humanity is capable of. If you collect anecdotes from engineers who've worked on scaling systems at the small number of companies at this scale, there seems to be general agreement that Google is "the best". My understanding from these anecdotes is that Go…

Google seems to have more than its fair share of good engineers, but the organization itself is not substantially different from other organizations.

Whether core services are "on fire" depends on which team you're on. Some core services are pretty much "on fire" all the time, with high pager loads for the SRE teams supporting them. Some core services are rock solid, and the SRE teams conduct exercises where they turn the service off just to remind people that the uptime SLO is not 100%.

Same goes for code quality. Some teams have code that you'd just love to print out and put the code listings on your desk. Some teams have code that doesn't make sense and nobody understands.

Some teams are highly functional, some teams are exceptionally dysfunctional.

Re: Software Engineering Insights from 10 Years at Google

#52

Post by sgammon »

Retric wrote: post #15
Supermancho wrote: post #8

Has someone collected all these self-aggrandizing posts that spew from ex-Googlers and current Googlers? It feels like a pre-requisite for their promotion packets. These all sound about the same and are altogether unhelpful. Note the copious links to terms and inlined quotes rather than an actual study, or any evidence at all...just vague rewording of colloquial expressions commonly traded around. The only use seems…

Look, yes this is another post that seems to be written by an idiot but that’s presumably because their simply a bad at this type of communication. Writing for a mass audience is just really difficult to do well and this is just one of the common failure modes for technical people. Even if you can’t find value in what was written just take it as a lesson in what not to do.

> because their simply a bad at this

you wrote this. about someone else's writing

Re: Software Engineering Insights from 10 Years at Google

#53

Post by verst »

erung88 wrote: post #45
passivate wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mind admitting Google employs people far smarter than I will ever be, but they're creating and maintaining the largest global spying apparatus in history. Maybe we should be learning from people who're actually making the world a better place.

They make you feel like they're smart but everything is relative. Google cloud is constantly the thrid in the market and significantly leg behind AWS in terms of market share while its CEO was replaced every 2 years so there are definitely smarter people (e.g. AWS engineers) out there.

Being third in the market is independent from the quality of services IMO. Whether the services are being offered that a lot of businesses need is a different question. The services Google Cloud does offer tend to be well designed but many of them are simply not what established businesses (and their engineering organizations) are accustomed to. Lower marketshare is not a direct consequence of engineering excellence (or an alleged lack thereof).

Conversely, simply having more market share doesn't mean AWS services are well engineered and the engineers are smarter (they might be, but you cannot make this claim).

Re: Software Engineering Insights from 10 Years at Google

#54

Post by lilcorey10 »

nowherebeen wrote: post #30
gmiller123456 wrote: post #20

Is there any evidence that Google is actually better at software engineering than other companies? IMHO, it seems they have enough money to deliberately do things inefficiently which would kill a smaller company, but Google can manage to succeed through brute force. Honestly I think the better example would be from a tiny company that can't afford to do things wrong.

Maybe 10 years ago when they were pushing the envelope. Nowadays, I just don’t see it to be honest. There are a few brilliant engineers for sure, but the new generation are mostly Leetcoders that brag about TC on another social network. You can see it in their open source code too. Critical bugs not fixed for an entire year. You read the code and it doesn’t stand out as anything out of the ordinary. I get the feeling…

No post body was provided.

Re: Software Engineering Insights from 10 Years at Google

#55

Post by EnKopVand »

> Start with the User Experience and work backwards to the technology you need.

> The best software is built by engineers who have empathy for their users.

I’m not sure where all the criticism here comes from but those alone are some of the most valuable insights any developer can obtain.

The fact that Google, in my opinion, is as far from those insights as a company can possibly come is in my eyes unrelated to the lessons that the author has learned working for Google. I think there is way too much anger in this thread, and I’m surprised to see it here on HN. I’ve personally moved all my services away from Google, including the paid ones like gsuite, but this article doesn’t seem to warrant any of the harsh criticism here based on its content.

Re: Software Engineering Insights from 10 Years at Google

#58

Post by zaphirplane »

rizzaxc wrote: post #41
angarg12 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If building, running and evolving very large and complex systems over many years is not a measure of software engineering quality, I don't know how else to compare companies.

Google has not pushed anything relevant to the user space for many, many years. It's not without reason people meme about Google Graveyard. Here in Hackernews, people constantly whine about their ads, their irrelevant google search, and what have you. Their latest "flagship" phone is littered with bugs. I wouldn't call them "evolving" anything software as of late. Their hard science departments seem good though, but…

TrueTime and spanner definitely fall in the wow category at least for me Microsoft one of the worlds top software companies couldn’t keep up with chrome.

There are a lot of projects that look easy at a POC stage and are very different at million of users, millions of tps, millions of TB or full featured

Re: Software Engineering Insights from 10 Years at Google

#59

Post by jdhendrickson »

addy_osmani wrote: post #14

Hey folks. Author of this post here. I sincerely apologize, this was accidentally published live prematurely (my fault). It’s got a number of style and structure issues I’ve been working through locally (you are spot on regarding the heading feedback). I have taken it down and will be publishing it in the future once it is actually complete.

Thanks for posting this reply to the article, I thought you had taken it down because half the people commenting seem to have forgotten a real human being exists behind the blog post.

Looking forward to reading it when you publish the revised version, though I'm unsure how I would know. (I guess I should check and see if you have RSS)

I wish the civility rules were enforced here a bit more stringently sometimes.

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