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Software Engineering at Google (2020)

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Re: Software Engineering at Google (2020)

#31

Post by flohofwoe »

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #11

"As far as this outsider can tell, the systems and processes for writing code at Google must be among the best in the world, given both the scale of the company and how often people sing their praises." Is this really the case? In high school I sure thought Google was a magical software heaven us mortals could but dream of working for, but now (and increasingly as of late) I'm strongly under the impression that 20 ye…

I can't think of a single C++ library coming out of Google I had to deal with and where I didn't have massive problems integrating them into my own C++ projects because of all the Google specialties baked into those projects (their own weird build tools which don't seem to have changed much since the early 2000's and the use of other Google dependencies like abseil).

Maybe it works well inside Google, but definitely not in the real world.

Re: Software Engineering at Google (2020)

#33

Post by foldr »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #16
ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #11

"As far as this outsider can tell, the systems and processes for writing code at Google must be among the best in the world, given both the scale of the company and how often people sing their praises." Is this really the case? In high school I sure thought Google was a magical software heaven us mortals could but dream of working for, but now (and increasingly as of late) I'm strongly under the impression that 20 ye…

Apple has undergone a similar ossification. I think it's just something that happens to companies that get a certain size. The Process becomes more important than the Product. When I was younger, I wanted so badly, to work at Apple. A few years ago, they actually approached me, and I found out that the culture seems to have drastically changed. They ended up not wanting me anyway, so maybe it's just sour grapes, on m…

Has it really? The transition to Apple Silicon was pretty impressive, and something that Apple could have simply decided not to do at all while still remaining hugely profitable. I don't know anything about the company's internal culture, but it's not exactly resting on its laurels just yet.

Re: Software Engineering at Google (2020)

#34

Post by lapcat »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #27
ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #11

"As far as this outsider can tell, the systems and processes for writing code at Google must be among the best in the world, given both the scale of the company and how often people sing their praises." Is this really the case? In high school I sure thought Google was a magical software heaven us mortals could but dream of working for, but now (and increasingly as of late) I'm strongly under the impression that 20 ye…

I don't understand your argument - why is the one trick pony revenue generation incompatible with high quality systems and processes for writing code? Both can be true at the same time, and my feeling is that they are, having worked there. The business is not very diversified, and the tools are great.

> I don't understand your argument - why does the lack of a diversified business have imply a lack of quality for systems and processes for writing code?

That wasn't the argument. The argument was simply that having a profitable monopoly doesn't imply the presence of quality.

Re: Software Engineering at Google (2020)

#35

Post by danpalmer »

ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #11

"As far as this outsider can tell, the systems and processes for writing code at Google must be among the best in the world, given both the scale of the company and how often people sing their praises." Is this really the case? In high school I sure thought Google was a magical software heaven us mortals could but dream of working for, but now (and increasingly as of late) I'm strongly under the impression that 20 ye…

The tooling is great in some ways, but possibly not in the way you'd expect.

There is a tool that will do almost anything, but the tools are often just a bit janky. Rather than thinking of the toolchain as some polished, tightly integrated, perfect system, think of it more like an internal open-source ecosystem of things that work together but which are made by individuals, with limited resources, that still feature bugs.

This is not to downplay what we have, it's amazing in many ways, but most tools are exactly the same sort of thing that you'd create in any other place, we just have more of them that cover almost every aspect of development. So much of the time I run into neat little systems and then discover they're a few Python scripts running under someone's personal quota. Sometimes these are 20% time projects, sometimes they are bits of tooling teams build for their own needs, sometimes they are more concerted efforts.

There is a core, tightly integrated set of systems that work well and are more "productized", but most of those aren't that much more special than what you can buy at any other company. If you've used Datadog then you'd feel at home in much of the modern infra tooling. Spanner is great, but anyone can pay to use it. Our CDN is very good, but there are other CDNs and from a developer perspective there isn't a whole lot of difference.

Re: Software Engineering at Google (2020)

#36

Post by BurningFrog »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #27
ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #11

"As far as this outsider can tell, the systems and processes for writing code at Google must be among the best in the world, given both the scale of the company and how often people sing their praises." Is this really the case? In high school I sure thought Google was a magical software heaven us mortals could but dream of working for, but now (and increasingly as of late) I'm strongly under the impression that 20 ye…

I don't understand your argument - why is the one trick pony revenue generation incompatible with high quality systems and processes for writing code? Both can be true at the same time, and my feeling is that they are, having worked there. The business is not very diversified, and the tools are great.

If Google's code writing process really was superior, you'd expect them to consistently produce killer products in other fields.

But I can't think of anything like that in the last 15 years.

Re: Software Engineering at Google (2020)

#38

Post by MarceColl »

jeffbee wrote: post #17
mushufasa wrote: post #4

Cool. Could someone, maybe an ex-googler, comment on which parts of these work well and which don't? A lot of other companies get into trouble trying to cargo-cult what Google does when they are operating in very different environments wherein those practices aren't optimal. E.g. different levels of scale. Additionally, critics of Google may point out that their engineering culture may not be great on its own terms -…

In my ex-Google experience, here are the stages of denial about something that Google does which is good but the industry doesn't yet embrace. Stage 1: "We're not Google, we don't need [[whatever]]"; Stage 2: Foreseeable disaster for which [[whatever]] was intended to address happens; Stage 3: Giant circus of P0/SEV0 action items while everyone assiduously ignores the [[whatever]]; Stage 4: Quiet accretion, over seve…

The tools, design and manpower needed to build a skyscraper are different from those needed to build a 1-story wood house. It's not that the ones that build the wood house are failing to study and adopt the ways of their extremely successful competitors.

Now, some of the things you say like unit-testing and user data encryption are ones that I've never seen associated with the "We're not google" mindset, so maybe people have started using that phrase for anythingnow

Re: Software Engineering at Google (2020)

#40

Post by danpalmer »

londons_explore wrote: post #28
ye-olde-sysrq wrote: post #11

"As far as this outsider can tell, the systems and processes for writing code at Google must be among the best in the world, given both the scale of the company and how often people sing their praises." Is this really the case? In high school I sure thought Google was a magical software heaven us mortals could but dream of working for, but now (and increasingly as of late) I'm strongly under the impression that 20 ye…

Google search was 1998. Google Maps was 2005. Gmail was 2004. Android was 2008. Youtube was 2005. Chrome was 2008. Docs was 2006. Translate was 2006. Yet in the last decade, they really haven't had many successes (perhaps with the exception of Google Photos - 2015) One would imagine that with nearly 200,000 employees at least one of them would have a good enough idea for a new product people like. But management and…

This is a common meme, but it depends how you define "product". There are companies with millions in VC backing that would just be a feature on a Google (or other big tech company) product as most people define them.

I would argue that taking a product from 100m to 1bn users is a whole new level of success, and that has been done multiple times in the last decade.

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