Google seems to have more than its fair share of good engineers, but the organization itself is not substantially different from other organizations. Whether c

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.