My previous experience, though I wrote software, was more like "research code" instead of "software engineering". We didn't have formal processes (no testing, t

My previous experience, though I wrote software, was more like "research code" instead of "software engineering". We didn't have formal processes (no testing, testing fixes in prod, etc). Our focus was more on the (cool) analysis we were doing and not on the reliability of our systems. One of the reasons I chose to join Google over another security-related company (that would have done little coding) was that I wanted to learn how to write software better. I've learned a lot about testing, understanding the reliability of distributed systems, writing code for maintainability, etc.