8 ms·

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 thi

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.

passivate 4y ago
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.
- reactjavascript 4y ago
  Teachers, nurses, and janitors
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- erung88 4y ago
  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.
  - verst 4y ago
    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).
    - erung88 4y ago
      I totally agree the quality of a product may or may not be directly proportional to the market share (e.g. Windows). My previous comment has nothing to do with engineering excellence. I never work at Google nor an expert on Google cloud so I don't know whether Cloud Google is well-designed (and I'm not surprised if it's). There're different ways to measure "smart". My view is that in the cloud computing business there are people smarter than them (at least in terms of market share) so it's perfectly fine that Google Cloud engineers learn from their competitors in terms of engineering, marketing, etc.
  - prox 4y ago
    They are only smart in the context of what they are optimizing against. It’s like that for all area’s of an expertise or goal/ideal.
- kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
  Trust me, they aren’t THAT smart. People I know who work at Google, let’s just say: they often fit a type.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    There's a (semi)famous Googler in one particular area. I had a buddy who worked with him years ago at a different company and took over a project after he left. There was nothing written after nearly a year - the guy either couldn't or wouldn't code anything, and now he's a well known Googler. Obviously there are extremely talented people there, but there are some bozos mixed in too.
    - kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
      He probably couldn’t be bothered by such mundane work.
  - passivate 4y ago
    I know of the famous people that work there, and I don't have anything personal against them. My comment was more directed towards the company. I can't support the way Google and other data mining companies operate. Its such a waste of talent.
- rswskg 4y ago
  Some are. It's now a giant company and recently partnerships with google bought me into contact with very average developers, gluing things together.
nowherebeen 4y ago
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 most are focused on promotion packages to raise their TC. If you read what the majority of them recommend, its similar to the banker's path in the early 2000s. Graduate from Ivy League, spent 3 years at FANG, then 2 years at Ivy League MBA, then back to FANG or join a startup for a few years so you can get a title bump when you do go back to FANG. The type of people that join Google nowadays aren't the type of people that were early employees. They have a very standard charted course to their careers. Google has reach maturity stage of the company. They have leeway to screw up like what Microsoft did with Windows and Office in the early 2000s. Will they have the ability to push out something completely new and amazing like Gmail or Google Maps (although Maps was a clone of Mapquest, they executed better), where the end users aren't developers themselves? I highly doubt it with an organization as big. There will be a lot of politics involved to get anything done. They have lost the talent to innovate.
- lilcorey10 4y ago
- phtrivier 4y ago
  What does TC mean in this context ?
  - Maro 4y ago
    Total Compensation
  - julianbuse 4y ago
    I believe it means total compensation.
  - aidaman 4y ago
    gtfo
dlp211 4y ago
I have only worked at a few companies, and I won't comment about the quality of engineering done at Google, but Google's Engineering Systems are the best I have ever used. From Code Search to Critique to Cider (Online IDE) to Blaze (Build) to having the entire code base "mounted" on my dev machine and the integration with golinks, it was an absolute pleasure to work with.
- paganel 4y ago
  > From Code Search What could have been... [1] Yes, I'm still bitter about it after all those years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Code_Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Code_Search
- saagarjha 4y ago
  > having the entire code base "mounted" on my dev machine My impression is that this is a result of a policy that google3 never touches a developer machine, which of course means you can't disconnect and work from a log cabin in the woods. Really sounds like bending yourself around an antipattern to be honest.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Very few people are capable of doing engineering from a cabin in the woods even if they can mirror the entire code base on their machine since engineering is a collaborative effort.
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      I would hope that you are able to work on self-contained projects without having to interact with other people for at least a day or two at a time…
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        Who is driving out to a cabin in the woods to work for just one day?
angarg12 4y ago
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.
- rizzaxc 4y ago
  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 these aren't software engineering
  - lrem 4y ago
    Is product definition a part of software engineering?
  - zaphirplane 4y ago
    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
    - rizzaxc 4y ago
      Chrome was released in 2008. Microsoft is doing fine with Edge, though it's a moot point because Microsoft is even older and more sluggish than Google. Spanner seems a prototypical Google dev product though; it's only invented to serve Google. I don't think any of their solutions is the de facto choice in any tech stack.
      - meowtimemania 4y ago
        Edge is just reskinned chrome browser. They discontinued their previous browser
Hermitian909 4y ago
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 Google core services are "on fire" less than everywhere else and require less maintenance. But that's a pretty narrow definition of software engineering. AWS, by all accounts, is much better at productizing something useful to the world. I've heard that the reason Microsoft lags Google in stability could plausibly be accounted for by the fact that they care so much more about maintaining backwards compatibility (which Google very clearly does not care about). All that said, I don't think its "best at software engineering" is a terribly useful category, better to say they are plausibly "best at a very specific and very difficult kind of software engineering".
- gmiller123456 4y ago
  Depends what you mean by "better at software engineering". I'm willing to accept any definition relevant to the advice given. If "the best" means "have enough money to overcome obstacles others don't", then that's something, but lets keep the advice relevant.
- klodolph 4y ago
  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.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "What Google seems to do really well is building robust systems at a scale that pushes the limits of what humanity is capable of" Can you give some examples of things Google did which pushed the limits of what humanity was capable of?
lkamr 4y ago
No, Googlers in CPython core for example are very unspectacular. Some are extremely power hungry, do nothing but try to rule the project with the boot, using dirty politician's tactics.
a_t48 4y ago
Small sample size, but the Google/exGoogle engineers I’ve interviewed are much more capable on average than others (or are at least better at crushing our interview loop). YMMV.

passivate 4y ago

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.

reactjavascript 4y ago
Teachers, nurses, and janitors
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
erung88 4y ago
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.
- verst 4y ago
  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).
  - erung88 4y ago
    I totally agree the quality of a product may or may not be directly proportional to the market share (e.g. Windows). My previous comment has nothing to do with engineering excellence. I never work at Google nor an expert on Google cloud so I don't know whether Cloud Google is well-designed (and I'm not surprised if it's). There're different ways to measure "smart". My view is that in the cloud computing business there are people smarter than them (at least in terms of market share) so it's perfectly fine that Google Cloud engineers learn from their competitors in terms of engineering, marketing, etc.
- prox 4y ago
  They are only smart in the context of what they are optimizing against. It’s like that for all area’s of an expertise or goal/ideal.
kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
Trust me, they aren’t THAT smart. People I know who work at Google, let’s just say: they often fit a type.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  There's a (semi)famous Googler in one particular area. I had a buddy who worked with him years ago at a different company and took over a project after he left. There was nothing written after nearly a year - the guy either couldn't or wouldn't code anything, and now he's a well known Googler. Obviously there are extremely talented people there, but there are some bozos mixed in too.
  - kwertyoowiyop 4y ago
    He probably couldn’t be bothered by such mundane work.
- passivate 4y ago
  I know of the famous people that work there, and I don't have anything personal against them. My comment was more directed towards the company. I can't support the way Google and other data mining companies operate. Its such a waste of talent.
rswskg 4y ago
Some are. It's now a giant company and recently partnerships with google bought me into contact with very average developers, gluing things together.

nowherebeen 4y ago

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 most are focused on promotion packages to raise their TC. If you read what the majority of them recommend, its similar to the banker's path in the early 2000s. Graduate from Ivy League, spent 3 years at FANG, then 2 years at Ivy League MBA, then back to FANG or join a startup for a few years so you can get a title bump when you do go back to FANG. The type of people that join Google nowadays aren't the type of people that were early employees. They have a very standard charted course to their careers. Google has reach maturity stage of the company. They have leeway to screw up like what Microsoft did with Windows and Office in the early 2000s. Will they have the ability to push out something completely new and amazing like Gmail or Google Maps (although Maps was a clone of Mapquest, they executed better), where the end users aren't developers themselves? I highly doubt it with an organization as big. There will be a lot of politics involved to get anything done. They have lost the talent to innovate.

lilcorey10 4y ago
phtrivier 4y ago
What does TC mean in this context ?
- Maro 4y ago
  Total Compensation
- julianbuse 4y ago
  I believe it means total compensation.
- aidaman 4y ago
  gtfo

dlp211 4y ago

I have only worked at a few companies, and I won't comment about the quality of engineering done at Google, but Google's Engineering Systems are the best I have ever used. From Code Search to Critique to Cider (Online IDE) to Blaze (Build) to having the entire code base "mounted" on my dev machine and the integration with golinks, it was an absolute pleasure to work with.

paganel 4y ago
> From Code Search What could have been... [1] Yes, I'm still bitter about it after all those years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Code_Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Code_Search
saagarjha 4y ago
> having the entire code base "mounted" on my dev machine My impression is that this is a result of a policy that google3 never touches a developer machine, which of course means you can't disconnect and work from a log cabin in the woods. Really sounds like bending yourself around an antipattern to be honest.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Very few people are capable of doing engineering from a cabin in the woods even if they can mirror the entire code base on their machine since engineering is a collaborative effort.
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    I would hope that you are able to work on self-contained projects without having to interact with other people for at least a day or two at a time…
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      Who is driving out to a cabin in the woods to work for just one day?

angarg12 4y ago

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.

rizzaxc 4y ago
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 these aren't software engineering
- lrem 4y ago
  Is product definition a part of software engineering?
- zaphirplane 4y ago
  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
  - rizzaxc 4y ago
    Chrome was released in 2008. Microsoft is doing fine with Edge, though it's a moot point because Microsoft is even older and more sluggish than Google. Spanner seems a prototypical Google dev product though; it's only invented to serve Google. I don't think any of their solutions is the de facto choice in any tech stack.
    - meowtimemania 4y ago
      Edge is just reskinned chrome browser. They discontinued their previous browser

Hermitian909 4y ago

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 Google core services are "on fire" less than everywhere else and require less maintenance. But that's a pretty narrow definition of software engineering. AWS, by all accounts, is much better at productizing something useful to the world. I've heard that the reason Microsoft lags Google in stability could plausibly be accounted for by the fact that they care so much more about maintaining backwards compatibility (which Google very clearly does not care about). All that said, I don't think its "best at software engineering" is a terribly useful category, better to say they are plausibly "best at a very specific and very difficult kind of software engineering".

gmiller123456 4y ago
Depends what you mean by "better at software engineering". I'm willing to accept any definition relevant to the advice given. If "the best" means "have enough money to overcome obstacles others don't", then that's something, but lets keep the advice relevant.
klodolph 4y ago
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.
pmoriarty 4y ago
"What Google seems to do really well is building robust systems at a scale that pushes the limits of what humanity is capable of" Can you give some examples of things Google did which pushed the limits of what humanity was capable of?

lkamr 4y ago

No, Googlers in CPython core for example are very unspectacular. Some are extremely power hungry, do nothing but try to rule the project with the boot, using dirty politician's tactics.

a_t48 4y ago

Small sample size, but the Google/exGoogle engineers I’ve interviewed are much more capable on average than others (or are at least better at crushing our interview loop). YMMV.