4 ms·

Early on in the article you describe the excitement your younger self had a the prospect of working with the "best engineers in the world". However further down

by smcl 9y ago

Early on in the article you describe the excitement your younger self had a the prospect of working with the "best engineers in the world". However further down you describe your difficulties with some products - undocumented code with no unit tests and silent failures which are hard-to-diagnose. Has your opinion changed about this at all? I am not sure how indicative these descriptions are to overall quality at Google ... but if they are indicative I'd be furious at the situation as a Google employee, where my (otherwise very smart) fellow Googlers are delivering what sounds like very poor products.

josefresco 9y ago
I too was also intrigued by the statement "best engineers in the world" and then subsequently reading that Google engineers suffer from the same BS as any average software company.
mtlynch 9y ago
No, I found developer quality to be very high at Google throughout my time there. I think the lack of tests was more symptomatic of bad incentives that good developers were forced to follow. Developers were rewarded for flashy things they could show promo committees, and rigorous tests or well-written documentation. It was unusual to find code with no tests because a code reviewer will usually insist on at least some tests. But it was common to see complicated behavior with just a single test associated. Or a complicated interaction between components with no end-to-end tests. There's not really a strict cultural expectation for documentation, so it's very easy to find code that's either not documented, documented inaccurately, or documented unhelpfully.
- smcl 9y ago
  Interesting, thanks for the reply!
- ironjunkie 9y ago
  Did you really believe you were working with the best developers in the world though? Did you not realize this was all part of a marketing machine to make you feel good?

4 ms·

Early on in the article you describe the excitement your younger self had a the prospect of working with the "best engineers in the world". However further down

by smcl 9y ago

josefresco 9y ago
I too was also intrigued by the statement "best engineers in the world" and then subsequently reading that Google engineers suffer from the same BS as any average software company.
mtlynch 9y ago
No, I found developer quality to be very high at Google throughout my time there. I think the lack of tests was more symptomatic of bad incentives that good developers were forced to follow. Developers were rewarded for flashy things they could show promo committees, and rigorous tests or well-written documentation. It was unusual to find code with no tests because a code reviewer will usually insist on at least some tests. But it was common to see complicated behavior with just a single test associated. Or a complicated interaction between components with no end-to-end tests. There's not really a strict cultural expectation for documentation, so it's very easy to find code that's either not documented, documented inaccurately, or documented unhelpfully.
- smcl 9y ago
  Interesting, thanks for the reply!
- ironjunkie 9y ago
  Did you really believe you were working with the best developers in the world though? Did you not realize this was all part of a marketing machine to make you feel good?