Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

Maybe you should clarify what company you worked in, because that's clearly not Google. In Google, SREs do 12 hour shifts. Night shifts (or rather 24 hour shifts) are (ironically enough) usually done by SWE teams. Almost every SWE team in Cloud has a 24 hour shift, and I agree, they are quite terrible.

I left over ten years ago and it's hard to understand that perspective. Back when I was an SRE (~2006 to 2009) there were only one or two monitoring systems (which didn't overlap, so you could argue there was one) and a handful of config languages. Compared to anywhere else Google had military levels of discipline and order.

> Deployments were infrequent, unreliable, and sometimes even done from a dev's machine.

Deployments were weekly and done from a dev machine because that way someone was watching it and could intervene in case of unexpected problems. Some teams didn't do that and tried to automate rollouts completely. I could always tell which products weren't doing enough manual work because I'd encounter obviously broken features live in production, do a bit of digging and discover end user complaints had been piling up in the support forums for months. But nobody was reading them, and the metrics didn't show any problem, and changes flowed into prod so the team just ... didn't realize their product wasn't working. There's no substitute for trying stuff out for yourself. I encounter clearly broken software that never seems to get fixed way too often these days and I'm sure it's partly because the teams in question don't use their own product much and don't even realize anything is wrong.

So sure they can very reliably and safely deploy... It just doesn't feel like they've actually deployed anything interesting in 5+ years (except maybe some AI stuff). From the outside it looks like the company is perpetually refactoring

history's biggest yakshave...? not surprising for a programmer-run company

I'm sure it still matters to bring down the power and server bills. But one can't help feel like they could be doing much more

The validated for their intelligence thing is a problem. Googlers in the early days constantly told each other that they were the "smartest people in the world". I noticed this immediately after joining and found it quietly troubling, because there's all kinds of smart and the interview processes were really only selecting for skill with computers or maths. A lot of Googlers wouldn't survive long on the streets or alone in the wilderness, as these require different kinds of smart to what they had. Some colleagues were troubled by those statements for other reasons: they didn't personally feel like one of the smartest people in the world, and this led to imposter syndrome. But we said nothing because, hey, the company was doing great and people did seem pretty smart overall back then. Plus nobody wants to call themselves out as an imposter, and Google had a certain degree of institutional humility to it as well. The company was very much about empowering everyone, no matter who or how "smart" they were.

What you're seeing from Google in the last ten years is a maybe predictable consequence of that culture, where some Googlers really do seem to think they're generically much smarter than everyone else, about everything. You started to see mass scale social engineering via manipulation of search results and products, driven apparently by the immense faith they have in their own wisdom. Is there any claim Googlers cannot immediately resolve as true or false given nothing more than a few ML models and a team of contractors in LatAm? Apparently some of them think that's all it takes.

This quasi-misanthropic culture is miles away from the trusting "make it universally available and useful" culture the company once had, but the seeds of that culture's end were clearly visible even at the start. You can't constantly validate people by telling them they're super smart before some of them come to actually believe it, and that leads naturally to the belief that if they're really the smartest people in the world then surely that means they should be running it.

Having spent some time with Google as SWE, I think Google was by far the best engineering company I have worked with. Even Amazon, Microsoft were terrible when it comes to software engineering.

I am one of those engineers who do not care about culture as long as I am getting paid for the efforts I put in. Google in that sense beat others by HUGE margin.

The engineering work was however very different. We focused on right engineering solutions instead of just business aspect. While that kind of attitude hurts us in short term, it pays big in long term.