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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

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?
- davidatbu 4y ago
  Not OP, but doesn't availing any particular tiny slice of all knowledge on the web to you within ~1.5 seconds, by inferring your intent incredibly accurately from a few words, count as "building robust systems ... that push the envelopes of what humanity is capable of"? Or, how about a video distribution network that serves more than 600,000 hours of video every minute, and manages to do that such that, every time service deteriorates on my 4G connection in a poor country, it's the last website (even considering text only websites) to stop working?
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    Yeah, I guess before Google you did have to wait 5 whole seconds to get the same information, because of all the ads AltaVista spewed at you along with their search results. Progress. As for YouTube, it was bought, not created by Google, wasn't it?
    - davidatbu 4y ago
      As to AltaVista, I'm not old enough to have used it. But my guess is that its accuracy and speed was not higher than that of the best competitors to Google right now. And to me, no competitor comes close in matching Google's combination of accuracy and speed across many categories of search (I've tried bing/you.com/yahoo.com/duckduckgo so far). As for youtube, serving video is not the impressive part. It's the scale at which they do it. And my understanding is that the scale has increased exponentially since the 2006 acquisition.
      - fatnoah 4y ago
        I'm old enough to remember AltaVista and all of the others. There's a reason I stopped using them almost immediately when I found Google.

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?

davidatbu 4y ago
Not OP, but doesn't availing any particular tiny slice of all knowledge on the web to you within ~1.5 seconds, by inferring your intent incredibly accurately from a few words, count as "building robust systems ... that push the envelopes of what humanity is capable of"? Or, how about a video distribution network that serves more than 600,000 hours of video every minute, and manages to do that such that, every time service deteriorates on my 4G connection in a poor country, it's the last website (even considering text only websites) to stop working?
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  Yeah, I guess before Google you did have to wait 5 whole seconds to get the same information, because of all the ads AltaVista spewed at you along with their search results. Progress. As for YouTube, it was bought, not created by Google, wasn't it?
  - davidatbu 4y ago
    As to AltaVista, I'm not old enough to have used it. But my guess is that its accuracy and speed was not higher than that of the best competitors to Google right now. And to me, no competitor comes close in matching Google's combination of accuracy and speed across many categories of search (I've tried bing/you.com/yahoo.com/duckduckgo so far). As for youtube, serving video is not the impressive part. It's the scale at which they do it. And my understanding is that the scale has increased exponentially since the 2006 acquisition.
    - fatnoah 4y ago
      I'm old enough to remember AltaVista and all of the others. There's a reason I stopped using them almost immediately when I found Google.