18 ms·

Software Engineering at Google (2020)

344 points by nvahalik 3y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
That's pretty interesting. I can't tell, right offhand, but is this an official Google publication?
- traxmaxx 3y ago
  seems to be the content of https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/software-engineering-at/9781492082781/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/software-engineering-at...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
  Yes: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book
- dagipflihax0r 3y ago
  see also: "Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time" 1st Edition by Titus Winters (Author), Tom Manshreck (Author), Hyrum Wright (Author) O'Reilly
mushufasa 3y ago
Cool. Could someone, maybe an ex-googler, comment on which parts of these work well and which don't? A lot of other companies get into trouble trying to cargo-cult what Google does when they are operating in very different environments wherein those practices aren't optimal. E.g. different levels of scale. Additionally, critics of Google may point out that their engineering culture may not be great on its own terms -- every time Google launches a new feature, people post links to the Google product graveyard.
- hiddencost 3y ago
  Engineering culture has somewhat collapsed at Google. The things that made engineering great didn't really survive the last couple rounds of internal coups.
  - n0zmer 3y ago
    I thought so too, but since then I moved over to Cloud and things are a LOT better.
    - jupblb 3y ago
      Nice bait
    - eddd-ddde 3y ago
      I always here about Cloud having the worst culture tho? Has that not been the case to you?
      - VirusNewbie 3y ago
        People work hard in cloud but there are no MBAs in sight. It’s all very technical work, often very bottom up driven. A lot of the overall goals of cloud are more ambitious than AWS offerings. Reliability is prized more than it is in other areas of Google as well, because customers are so technical and often notice. Not a place to coast, but I’d say most people do a solid 45 a week for those that want to get good reviews and get a fat bonus.
        nonethewiser 3y ago
        > A lot of the overall goals of cloud are more ambitious than AWS offerings. In what sense?
      - opportune 3y ago
        Some teams in Cloud suck but the core engineering teams have some top talent and solve some very hard problems. Keep in mind Borg and Spanner are both “cloud”, but so are many field sales teams with an average tenure <2y
dboreham 3y ago
This part is good: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch13.html#prefer_realism_over_isolation https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch13.html#prefer_r...
- kyrra 3y ago
  I'd say it's a tradeoff. If you are entirely driven by tests that include your deps, they will be slow. Unit tests are good at catching basic behavior issues that would show up with an integration test, but it's easier to see the cause. I'm of the opinion that both are needed, but don't put all your eggs in unit tests (they don't need to be perfect). That extra time being spent on integration tests tend to be better for maintaining system health.
  - compiler-guy 3y ago
    Google's massive distributed build system also runs tests and so most projects run their dependent tests in parallel on thousands of machines.
    - kuchenbecker 3y ago
      With an optional --runs-per-test=1000
jsnell 3y ago
(2020). Earlier discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224545 (304 points, 179 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609807 (222 points, 70 comments)
- dang 3y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: Software Engineering at Google (2020) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224545 - May 2022 (178 comments) Software Engineering at Google - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609807 - March 2020 (69 comments) Similar sounding but different: Software Engineering at Google (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18818412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18818412 - Jan 2019 (309 comments) Software Engineering at Google - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13619378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13619378 - Feb 2017 (156 comments)
ye-olde-sysrq 3y ago
"As far as this outsider can tell, the systems and processes for writing code at Google must be among the best in the world, given both the scale of the company and how often people sing their praises." Is this really the case? In high school I sure thought Google was a magical software heaven us mortals could but dream of working for, but now (and increasingly as of late) I'm strongly under the impression that 20 years ago they discovered unobtanium in the form of a very under-served search and ads market, they plopped down camp on top of it and turned it into a giant money firehose, and now to this day are simply operating that ridiculously high-margin business while trying desperately to find another vein of unobtanium because when you already have one, that's the only thing that even registers on your radar. "Revenue from Google Network ads hit $7.5 billion (10.7%), and YouTube ad revenues registered at $6.7 billion (9.6%). In other words, at $54.5 billion, the total ad revenue from Google constituted 78.2% of the company's total revenue in the quarter." https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-does-google-make-money https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-does-google-make-money 78% between google and youtube. And given youtube isn't nearly as high-margin as the search product (can you even imagine the cost related to essentially storing the video history of the world?), I'm hesitant to say youtube is their 2nd vein. So yeah. Turns out when you have essentially a monopoly in a high-margin business, you can do basically anything and build an entire private software ecosystem without going bankrupt. I interpret "how google does it" to simply mean "look at all this cool stuff you can do when your product is this high-margin".
- nosefrog 3y ago
  I used to work there. The tooling is pretty good.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    I’ve not worked there but I’ve worked with many exgooglers. They tend to think Google * is the best in the world and they created it before anyone else and everyone else with similar capabilities copied them, and that Googlers are smarter. However every company of their size and technical complexity has built almost exactly the same tooling and processes, but don’t carry the same attitude around. At a certain point I’ve learned to smile and nod as they explain and take credit for things I’ve developed myself at other FAANG and adjacent highly technical megacorps. The final thing of note is they seem to be unable to replicate their magic outside of Google, and blame the org they’re now in for being deficient in some way for that. “At Google we had X and didn’t have to worry about Y, without Y we can’t do X,” where Y is some nebulous qualitative feature of google culture. After I finish smiling and nodding I just go build X. N.b., I’m not saying nosefrog is this person, or even everyone at google or ex-google is like this. This was just my experience working with senior principal or other very senior engineering staff.
deleted 3y ago
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flohofwoe 3y ago
Probably a bit off-topic, but since I'm a bit triggered by the 'abseil' in the domain name: I wish Google would relax their 'guidelines' when it comes to software that's also published outside of Google. Case in point: the Dawn C++ library (Google's native WebGPU implementation) has a dependency on abseil, and from what I've seen when glancing over the code, the only reason seems to be some minor string-related stuff. I can only assume that there must be some interal NIH rule inside Google to use abseil in place of the C++ stdlib (of course I would prefer if Dawn would use neither abseil nor the stdlib, especially since it looks like the only component that's used are related to strings, which definitely isn't the focus of a 3D API). ...and then there's of course the use of 'Google Depot Tools' and of course they are using their own build system [1] (however at least there the Dawn team rebelled and also provides cmake build files). All those Google specifics make it increadibly difficult to integrate Google C++ projects into any non-Google project, and because of this "Google C++ bubble" I would seriously hesitate taking any advice from them about software engineering as gospel, at least when it comes to C++. [1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/tools/gn/+/48062805e19b4697c5fbd926dc649c78b6aaa138/README.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/tools/gn/+/48...
- jeffbee 3y ago
  Just glancing at Dawn, which I never heard of until now, it appears their use of absl is similar in purpose to the way other Google open source projects use it: faced with the choice between requiring C++20 (or 17, or 14) or requiring only C++11 and using absl as a kind of polyfill, they chose the latter.
- tylerhou 3y ago
  For string related stuff — there’s not much in the stdlib that can replace the stuff in abseil. (Haven’t looked at Dawn in particular, though.) E.g. absl::StrFormat — no equivalent until std::format was standardized in C++20. absl::StrCat: You could use streams, but, ew. Also, StrCat is optimized to reserve sufficient size in advance, so it is more efficient than appending to a string or using a std::stringstream. absl::Cord. No equivalent in the stdlib.
- xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
paxys 3y ago
Can't say about the content, but this is possibly the worst website layout and navigation I have seen. How are you even supposed to read this thing? Is there a version with links from one chapter to the next? Or a PDF?
- deleted 3y ago
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- outside1234 3y ago
  Just buy the O'Reilly book
formvoltron 3y ago
Is there an epub version?
- captn3m0 3y ago
  I wrote some code last week to generate one: https://github.com/captn3m0/swe-ebook https://github.com/captn3m0/swe-ebook
  - formvoltron 3y ago
    thanks! hmm it's a 404
bluefishinit 3y ago
Unless you have a monopoly on the ad market that's going to mask all of your bad managerial, strategy and culture problems, then I'd advise steering well clear of copying Google. They make money in-spite of their day to day practices, not because of them.
- zirgs 3y ago
  Yup - just look at Stadia. This is how they handle stuff that's not related to ads.
- opportune 3y ago
  From someone who’s seen how the sausage gets made, I both agree and disagree. A lot of Google’s practices really are good software engineering practices - provided you have the money to invest in replicating it to a high degree of quality, which could be substantial and better spent elsewhere. When you have one of the most lucrative business models of all time you definitely have the money to invest in trying to make it as stable to maintain and easy to add value onto as possible, so it was definitely worth it for Google in many cases, but each other company will have to determine the costs vs benefits themselves. Replicating Blaze and Forge seems really expensive and hard to get right (though it can be tremendously valuable for development on a large codebase). Postmortems, containerization, servers-as-cattle, gradual non-global releases… those aren’t as expensive to set up and have great cost/benefit ratios. It’d be stupid to not do these just because Google does them (and in some cases invented or popularized the practice).
CoastalCoder 3y ago
The "3. Thesis" section [0] seems empty. Anyone know what's up with that? [0] https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/part1.html https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/part1.html
- lapcat 3y ago
  It's just a separator page. Each of the parts is like that: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/part2.html https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/part2.html This is an html copy of a physical book. In book, that's nothing unusual.
dudul 3y ago
I've always found it weird that people seem to obsess so much on how Google does things. From hiring to writing code and tooling. Google is so much not like any other company, especially 20 employee startups. Trying to apply their recipes to 99% of companies is solving problems that don't exist and most likely creating new ones you don't need to deal with.
- lapcat 3y ago
  Related: The Carrot Problem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37100226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37100226
7e 3y ago
For all of this, Google doesn’t create very good products anymore. This is a guide that came into being _after_ Google was successful. It’s not _why_ Google became successful. Yes, if you have a mountain of money and a horde of underutilized employees, it’s easy to gold plate your engineering and navel-gaze at your biases.
- x86x87 3y ago
  It depends how you look at it. A lot of products created by Google were good/high quality but were killed anyway. It's sad to see things being killed because they were not "big enough".
  - natch 3y ago
    The ones that were not killed are atrociously shoddy and have been now for, you’d think I was going to say years, but it’s actually decades.
    - philote 3y ago
      I feel like even their main products are shoddy as well. How can they recommend good, relevant ads if they can't even recommend good news articles, music, or videos? If I do any search in Google on a topic, even if it's just to get a tiny bit of info about that topic, Google decides I'm interested in it and will make recommendations based on that one, single search. Or sometimes I'll buy a product and start seeing ads for similar products later. That's not good targeting IMO.
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  Whenever I watch/read interviews with people who were successful in some way, they usually downplay the ugly hacks and shortcuts they took to get there, and are quick to say that they "should have done it <the right way>". It's really hard to get any insights because of this inherently unreliable narration.
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
water-your-self 3y ago
How have layoffs impact group psychological safety?
- x86x87 3y ago
  I think they hit pretty hard. I remember some hardcore arguments with buddies that work at google when I told them that based on google's behavior layoffs are going to happen (this was 3-6 months before google did their first layoffs in history). I was brushed off with "google would not do that" and "our culture us different". It was heartbreaking to hear how their view on google transformed after layoffs did happen.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  Not good. I've seen people rapidly shift to career protection, wagon-circling, and empire building. I've seen more competition for leading junior people since there are fewer new hires coming in. But mostly I've seen the company become more cynical towards executives. Depending on your feelings on AI, you might see new excitement and opportunity opening up or further meddling and messy product management in the future. I'm not sure where I land here yet. I think Google is still a very good place to work. Pay is high. WLB is great (at least where I sit). Tooling is very good. I haven't had any asshole managers or directors. But I definitely find it hard to get people excited about taking a big risk or maintain a project that is important but somehow misaligned with what your VP cares about.
idk1 3y ago
Is the culture section being 100% blank a very wry joke about there being no culture or a mistake? https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/part2.html https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/part2.html
- sowbug 3y ago
  Neither. Each part -- Thesis, Culture, Processes, Tools, etc. -- has its own heading. The formatting of the table of contents does not convey it well.
suyash 3y ago
A book on software engineering but totally missing how decisions are made around what features to build, what bugs to fix. I would have love to read more on how Google engineers prioritise work, what makes them more creative in terms of building innovative features and products. Also would have love to read how UI engineering is done while working with designers etc.
- namdnay 3y ago
  What you’re describing sounds more like a book on product management?
  - natch 3y ago
    Yeah but ideally some PM spirit should also be built into a good developer culture so they can fill any PM gaps when needed, imho.
    - kaycebasques 3y ago
      To add to your point, I think what they said about technical writing might also apply to product management: > It introduced a perverse incentive: become an important project and your software engineers won’t need to write documents. Discouraging engineers from writing documents turns out to be the opposite of what you want to do. Because they are a limited resource, technical writers should generally focus on tasks that software engineers don’t need to do as part of their normal duties. Usually, this involves writing documents that cross API boundaries. Project Foo might clearly know what documentation Project Foo needs, but it probably has a less clear idea what Project Bar needs. A technical writer is better able to stand in as a person unfamiliar with the domain. In fact, it’s one of their critical roles: to challenge the assumptions your team makes about the utility of your project. It’s one of the reasons why many, if not most, software engineering technical writers tend to focus on this specific type of API documentation. PMs are a scarce resource. A lot of eng teams within Google don't have a dedicated PM and need to carve out product-market fit for themselves. When you have a dedicated PM it's easier to offload all PM ideas and responsibilities to that person. (I'm a technical writer at Google. The boilerplate "all opinions my own" is important in this convo because I think a lot of TWs and PMs will strongly disagree with these ideas.)
jroseattle 3y ago
If this document is intended as a how-google-does-it for applicability outside of Google, then the leadership section (Ch9) should include a heavy dose of your-mileage-may-vary. It is very good advice, but requires great cultural and executive support. All the adages listed here make perfect sense, but they don't succeed in a vacuum. Servant leadership is great, until individuals disagree with product strategy and priorities. Addressing low performers is great, until a company's HR policies make doing so onerous. I could go on, but there are often many things outside of your control as a leader that directly affect your capability to manage. It's all part of the job and something to account for, but set your expectations accordingly.
zinsn1 3y ago
Found it here how Google Engineering Career Ladder is structured: https://labs.revelo.com/template/google-google-software-engineering-ic-ladder-249 https://labs.revelo.com/template/google-google-software-engi...
- neilv 3y ago
  https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&track...
- systemBuilder 3y ago
  That's mostly propaganda, like most companies, Google has a policy of something like 5x-10x fewer people at every level as you go up the management chain, and they enforce that policy in preference and use these sugar-coated candy-cane level guidance documents to hide their sleaze.
andsoitis 3y ago
The Beyoncé Rule More colloquially, this is phrased as “If you liked it, you should have put a CI test on it,” which we call “The Beyoncé Rule."13 From a scaling perspective, the Beyoncé Rule implies that complicated, one-off bespoke tests that aren’t triggered by our common CI system do not count.
- ajross 3y ago
  Pet peeve: There's an anticorrolary though, which is that tests written solely for the requirements of an elaborate CI system tend to hurt and not help. Tests need to be trivially executable and inspectable by developers running on their own systems with minimal support. If they aren't, then all you know is that "It's Broken!" and not how to fix it. Good CI is good because it easily integrates "one-off bespoke tests", not because it outlaws them.
  - joshuamorton 3y ago
    This is a non-sequitor I think. A bad ci system is independent from the mandate that, functionally "unless we can verify we don't break you, you can't complain when we do".
    - ajross 3y ago
      No? The two statements at hand equate to: "Do not add features to the product without adding validation to CI" and "Do not write validation steps CI just to add features to the product". Those are pretty clearly related concepts. And the reason for the disconnect is that the former centers the requirements of integration and not development, which is exactly backwards. CI isn't "the place where you run tests". The place where you run tests is underneath the software developers' fingers. CI is where you integrate tests developers are already running. And to the extent that is not true, CI stops being a useful tool for development and turns into just another roadblock to evade.
      - joshuamorton 3y ago
        > No? The two statements at hand equate to: "Do not add features to the product without adding validation to CI" and "Do not write validation steps CI just to add features to the product". Those are pretty clearly related concepts. Only if your CI and developer workflow are different. To a first approximation, at Google, I run `blaze test //foo` to test `foo`, and CI invokes the same command when testing `foo`. There's caveats here, but they don't apply to the beyonce rule in practice, which is centered on unit tests that can be run hermetically on presubmit. Your weird 3-hour integration test won't be run. Edit: Actually it seems like you're saying "once you've tested a feature once, you can release it", which...no. You need some way of ensuring you don't regress, the CI suite is how you do that, otherwise no one will know when the new release of some random open source library that you depend on breaks your application.
siliconc0w 3y ago
IMO bang for buck is to invest in: * reproducible fast dev environments - anyone should be able to build anything pretty easily fairly quickly * culture of design reviews, testing, and code reviews. * CI/CD, static analysis, PaaS, dependency management. You can do all of these without Google-level or really any bespoke tooling. A lot of what google builds is for operating at Google scale - distributed builds and running of huge applications - and even then this tooling this simply enables working at this scale, it comes with a lot of cost(speed/complexity) and jank you don't need at smaller software shops.
renecito 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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syngrog66 3y ago
When I see the font and color contrast scheme on that page I nope aborted fast. and dont tell me I can override it in my browser. Neither my Android phone or Android Chrome honors my expressed wish to override everything with a high contrast, dark theme. A few honor it, many apps and docs do not. That article does not.
- deleted 3y ago
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jimbooonooo 3y ago
Cool, is this available as a PDF?
- neilv 3y ago
  "https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/209970024/software-engineering-at-google/titus-winters/ https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/209970024/software-enginee..." includes PDF and EPUB formats. (I bought it, intending it as interview prep for an experienced engineer interview, but seems they are doing student-startup-style Leetcode interviews.)
esafak 3y ago
Google is not what it used to be but this book is great. So much distilled wisdom.
very_good_man 3y ago
When are we going to advance as an industry and stop worshiping these people? If you have a decade in control of the greatest internet business ever, go ahead and do exactly as Google has done. For anyone else, look inward for inspiration!
carabiner 3y ago
Is there a reason to emulate google if your company is not trying to become an adtech behemoth? Google just sells ads, and has not originated a successful product besides search. They have an endless stream of failed pursuits, and so this could be a guidebook on inefficiency and exploratory tangents that don't produce value. That's why they laid off 12,000 employees since this guide was written. If anything, companies should try to follow Apple's workflow, which hasn't had layoffs and has a track record of elegant software that produces value in new areas.
- salil999 3y ago
  What a narrow minded view. This post and book has nothing to do with the product side of Google. You can argue about their products failing to gain traction in the market. But it's clear that Google is a leader in the software engineering industry. They have launched tons of tools and paradigms which has changed the way the entire software engineering industry works.
lhorie 3y ago
I'm stumbling into this thread right after experiencing what appears to be a pretty catastrophic failure of Google's main product. As I write this, the search results for "Google stock" (among other queries) returns zero results ("Your search - google stock - did not match any documents"). I'm not really sure what to make out of these discussions about how X or Y Google engineering is, while the production service is broken for an end user like me.
- roody15 3y ago
  The decline of google’s search engine has really been dramatic. It honestly is just a poor product at this point and I find myself having to use yandex, bing and variety of other tools now to find what I am looking for. My guess is that between SEO companies and Google just trying to maximize ad profits the product is in terminal decline
  - systemBuilder 3y ago
    They really don't give a shit how many search engineers they drive away with 50+-hour weeks and their endless criticism. When it became uncool to have Google Search on your resume in 2018, I left.
- alex_lav 3y ago
  I’ve been unable to “Mark as read” in GMail for two years now.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Searching for "Google stock" shows me correct results. A stock chart followed by various search results. There's no news of a widespread Google failure. Maybe you have a browser extension interfering? Or there's some kind of very localized hiccup. In any case, your experience right now isn't even close to representative. For its scale and complexity, Google search is probably one of the most reliable services ever built.
  - bradley13 3y ago
oweiler 3y ago
Great book, a modern classic IMHO
nerdchum 3y ago
I thought that the more high status the company would indicate better technology stacks and better quality of engineering.... but all the high status seems to do is pull in people who are really good at politics and doing promotion based development which is kind of counter to the science aspect of computer science.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  I've consistently gotten the impression that the difference between high performing organizations like Google and less high-performing organizations is that Google doesn't just _say_ they do this stuff, they actually do it, too. (Or, at least, they used to).
  - nerdchum 3y ago
    > "High performing" I havent really see Google doing any innovation in about a decade or more? What have they done significant since maps and android over a decade ago? Apple stomping them in hardware, openai stomping them in AI, AWS stomping them in cloud, Nvidia stomping them on game streaming. Google has a monopoly on a big ad network at its core and thats not high performing or innovative.
w10-1 3y ago
As a counterpoint to the engineering/product/culture comments providing context on the book, I would point out that Urs Hölzle has recently stepped back from uber-manager to individual contributor in the infrastructure space. This is the guy who built the hotspot JIT that added decades to the life of Java, and who engineered Google's data centers and GCP. He obviously doesn't need more money or glory or experience, so ... why? There are a million examples of things gone wrong, but it may be worth studying one example of how someone could have such an impact and still just love what he's doing.
- iaseiadit 3y ago
  Did he have any involvement in this book? He’s not an author and not in the acknowledgments: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/pr01.html#_acknowledgments https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/pr01.html#_acknowl...
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Are we thinking about the same Urs? His reputation was not particularly good when I was in the TI group at Google recently. He also had nothing to do with this book.
SNosTrAnDbLe 3y ago
Google is not a good example to look at if you are thinking about enterprise software as these need to be supported long term and Google is not very good at that. They have a history of making breaking changes and discontinuing products. Microsoft is a much better example for business software as they are (were?) paranoid about backward compatibility.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  You're confusing software engineering with corporate product support. You can have top-notch ongoing lifetimes for trash products. See for example SAP or anything Oracle.
  - SNosTrAnDbLe 3y ago
    Product support is an integral part of enterprise software engineering. Product management does not know what adding a new feature or deprecating an old feature means. It is the responsibility of engineering to provide the dependency matrix. For example, engineering usually tells product, if you change feature A, then it will also affect feature B, C and Z. Otherwise you may end up with contract breaches and SLA violations. Product lifetime and providing incremental features is a big reason why SAP and Oracle have been successful in the enterprise space and people still pay a lot of money to buy them.
    - cratermoon 3y ago
      > SAP and Oracle have been successful in the enterprise space Yes, but are the well-engineered software?
coryfklein 3y ago
I've been listening to the audiobook and definitely recommend it to others. Also, it's free. [0] [0] https://www.audible.com/pd/Software-Engineering-at-Google-Audiobook/B08VLS9Y95 https://www.audible.com/pd/Software-Engineering-at-Google-Au...
DeathMetal3000 3y ago
Official PDF on github: https://github.com/abseil/abseil.github.io/blob/a5168e886917031023a2757cf9ce8faef422fbd9/resources/swe_at_google.2.pdf https://github.com/abseil/abseil.github.io/blob/a5168e886917...
appleflaxen 3y ago
> Part I. Thesis ...and then it's blank. Am I missing something?
- lapcat 3y ago
  Yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37121599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37121599
systemBuilder 3y ago
Most people will misinterpret what this book really is. Most people will think, "Hmm if I read this book I can start another google." Nothing could further from the truth. This is a book about how to run a gigantic software organization once it gets huge, rich, and sclerotic. This book has no insight into how to start another Google. The only insight is into where will you end up if your startup ends up huge, rich, and sclerotic, like Google.
sharts 3y ago
People seem to blindly worship Google too much. There have always been good ideas in engineering but because Google has the money to implement them at scale they get all of the credit. Testing, reproducibility, etc. These have always been common sense. It's just that people only adopt them when the big guys do it because we implicitly give authority to those with money and power. It's not different than when you see folks making videos of "How a millionaire structures his time." Like, wtf. Those ideas existed before the millionaire. Many people already practice those. And those alone are not what made the millionaire.

344 points by nvahalik 3y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

That's pretty interesting. I can't tell, right offhand, but is this an official Google publication?

traxmaxx 3y ago
seems to be the content of https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/software-engineering-at/9781492082781/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/software-engineering-at...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
Yes: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book
dagipflihax0r 3y ago
see also: "Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time" 1st Edition by Titus Winters (Author), Tom Manshreck (Author), Hyrum Wright (Author) O'Reilly

mushufasa 3y ago

Cool. Could someone, maybe an ex-googler, comment on which parts of these work well and which don't? A lot of other companies get into trouble trying to cargo-cult what Google does when they are operating in very different environments wherein those practices aren't optimal. E.g. different levels of scale. Additionally, critics of Google may point out that their engineering culture may not be great on its own terms -- every time Google launches a new feature, people post links to the Google product graveyard.

hiddencost 3y ago
Engineering culture has somewhat collapsed at Google. The things that made engineering great didn't really survive the last couple rounds of internal coups.
- n0zmer 3y ago
  I thought so too, but since then I moved over to Cloud and things are a LOT better.
  - jupblb 3y ago
    Nice bait
  - eddd-ddde 3y ago
    I always here about Cloud having the worst culture tho? Has that not been the case to you?
    - VirusNewbie 3y ago
      People work hard in cloud but there are no MBAs in sight. It’s all very technical work, often very bottom up driven. A lot of the overall goals of cloud are more ambitious than AWS offerings. Reliability is prized more than it is in other areas of Google as well, because customers are so technical and often notice. Not a place to coast, but I’d say most people do a solid 45 a week for those that want to get good reviews and get a fat bonus.
      - nonethewiser 3y ago
        > A lot of the overall goals of cloud are more ambitious than AWS offerings. In what sense?
    - opportune 3y ago
      Some teams in Cloud suck but the core engineering teams have some top talent and solve some very hard problems. Keep in mind Borg and Spanner are both “cloud”, but so are many field sales teams with an average tenure <2y

dboreham 3y ago

This part is good: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch13.html#prefer_realism_over_isolation https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/ch13.html#prefer_r...

kyrra 3y ago
I'd say it's a tradeoff. If you are entirely driven by tests that include your deps, they will be slow. Unit tests are good at catching basic behavior issues that would show up with an integration test, but it's easier to see the cause. I'm of the opinion that both are needed, but don't put all your eggs in unit tests (they don't need to be perfect). That extra time being spent on integration tests tend to be better for maintaining system health.
- compiler-guy 3y ago
  Google's massive distributed build system also runs tests and so most projects run their dependent tests in parallel on thousands of machines.
  - kuchenbecker 3y ago
    With an optional --runs-per-test=1000

jsnell 3y ago

(2020). Earlier discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224545 (304 points, 179 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609807 (222 points, 70 comments)

dang 3y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: Software Engineering at Google (2020) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31224545 - May 2022 (178 comments) Software Engineering at Google - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22609807 - March 2020 (69 comments) Similar sounding but different: Software Engineering at Google (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18818412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18818412 - Jan 2019 (309 comments) Software Engineering at Google - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13619378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13619378 - Feb 2017 (156 comments)

ye-olde-sysrq 3y ago

"As far as this outsider can tell, the systems and processes for writing code at Google must be among the best in the world, given both the scale of the company and how often people sing their praises." Is this really the case? In high school I sure thought Google was a magical software heaven us mortals could but dream of working for, but now (and increasingly as of late) I'm strongly under the impression that 20 years ago they discovered unobtanium in the form of a very under-served search and ads market, they plopped down camp on top of it and turned it into a giant money firehose, and now to this day are simply operating that ridiculously high-margin business while trying desperately to find another vein of unobtanium because when you already have one, that's the only thing that even registers on your radar. "Revenue from Google Network ads hit $7.5 billion (10.7%), and YouTube ad revenues registered at $6.7 billion (9.6%). In other words, at $54.5 billion, the total ad revenue from Google constituted 78.2% of the company's total revenue in the quarter." https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-does-google-make-money https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-does-google-make-money 78% between google and youtube. And given youtube isn't nearly as high-margin as the search product (can you even imagine the cost related to essentially storing the video history of the world?), I'm hesitant to say youtube is their 2nd vein. So yeah. Turns out when you have essentially a monopoly in a high-margin business, you can do basically anything and build an entire private software ecosystem without going bankrupt. I interpret "how google does it" to simply mean "look at all this cool stuff you can do when your product is this high-margin".

nosefrog 3y ago
I used to work there. The tooling is pretty good.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I’ve not worked there but I’ve worked with many exgooglers. They tend to think Google * is the best in the world and they created it before anyone else and everyone else with similar capabilities copied them, and that Googlers are smarter. However every company of their size and technical complexity has built almost exactly the same tooling and processes, but don’t carry the same attitude around. At a certain point I’ve learned to smile and nod as they explain and take credit for things I’ve developed myself at other FAANG and adjacent highly technical megacorps. The final thing of note is they seem to be unable to replicate their magic outside of Google, and blame the org they’re now in for being deficient in some way for that. “At Google we had X and didn’t have to worry about Y, without Y we can’t do X,” where Y is some nebulous qualitative feature of google culture. After I finish smiling and nodding I just go build X. N.b., I’m not saying nosefrog is this person, or even everyone at google or ex-google is like this. This was just my experience working with senior principal or other very senior engineering staff.

deleted 3y ago

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flohofwoe 3y ago

Probably a bit off-topic, but since I'm a bit triggered by the 'abseil' in the domain name: I wish Google would relax their 'guidelines' when it comes to software that's also published outside of Google. Case in point: the Dawn C++ library (Google's native WebGPU implementation) has a dependency on abseil, and from what I've seen when glancing over the code, the only reason seems to be some minor string-related stuff. I can only assume that there must be some interal NIH rule inside Google to use abseil in place of the C++ stdlib (of course I would prefer if Dawn would use neither abseil nor the stdlib, especially since it looks like the only component that's used are related to strings, which definitely isn't the focus of a 3D API). ...and then there's of course the use of 'Google Depot Tools' and of course they are using their own build system [1] (however at least there the Dawn team rebelled and also provides cmake build files). All those Google specifics make it increadibly difficult to integrate Google C++ projects into any non-Google project, and because of this "Google C++ bubble" I would seriously hesitate taking any advice from them about software engineering as gospel, at least when it comes to C++. [1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/tools/gn/+/48062805e19b4697c5fbd926dc649c78b6aaa138/README.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/tools/gn/+/48...

jeffbee 3y ago
Just glancing at Dawn, which I never heard of until now, it appears their use of absl is similar in purpose to the way other Google open source projects use it: faced with the choice between requiring C++20 (or 17, or 14) or requiring only C++11 and using absl as a kind of polyfill, they chose the latter.
tylerhou 3y ago
For string related stuff — there’s not much in the stdlib that can replace the stuff in abseil. (Haven’t looked at Dawn in particular, though.) E.g. absl::StrFormat — no equivalent until std::format was standardized in C++20. absl::StrCat: You could use streams, but, ew. Also, StrCat is optimized to reserve sufficient size in advance, so it is more efficient than appending to a string or using a std::stringstream. absl::Cord. No equivalent in the stdlib.
xyzzy_plugh 3y ago

paxys 3y ago

Can't say about the content, but this is possibly the worst website layout and navigation I have seen. How are you even supposed to read this thing? Is there a version with links from one chapter to the next? Or a PDF?

deleted 3y ago
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outside1234 3y ago
Just buy the O'Reilly book

formvoltron 3y ago

Is there an epub version?

captn3m0 3y ago
I wrote some code last week to generate one: https://github.com/captn3m0/swe-ebook https://github.com/captn3m0/swe-ebook
- formvoltron 3y ago
  thanks! hmm it's a 404

bluefishinit 3y ago

Unless you have a monopoly on the ad market that's going to mask all of your bad managerial, strategy and culture problems, then I'd advise steering well clear of copying Google. They make money in-spite of their day to day practices, not because of them.

zirgs 3y ago
Yup - just look at Stadia. This is how they handle stuff that's not related to ads.
opportune 3y ago
From someone who’s seen how the sausage gets made, I both agree and disagree. A lot of Google’s practices really are good software engineering practices - provided you have the money to invest in replicating it to a high degree of quality, which could be substantial and better spent elsewhere. When you have one of the most lucrative business models of all time you definitely have the money to invest in trying to make it as stable to maintain and easy to add value onto as possible, so it was definitely worth it for Google in many cases, but each other company will have to determine the costs vs benefits themselves. Replicating Blaze and Forge seems really expensive and hard to get right (though it can be tremendously valuable for development on a large codebase). Postmortems, containerization, servers-as-cattle, gradual non-global releases… those aren’t as expensive to set up and have great cost/benefit ratios. It’d be stupid to not do these just because Google does them (and in some cases invented or popularized the practice).

CoastalCoder 3y ago

The "3. Thesis" section [0] seems empty. Anyone know what's up with that? [0] https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/part1.html https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/part1.html

lapcat 3y ago
It's just a separator page. Each of the parts is like that: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/part2.html https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/part2.html This is an html copy of a physical book. In book, that's nothing unusual.

dudul 3y ago

I've always found it weird that people seem to obsess so much on how Google does things. From hiring to writing code and tooling. Google is so much not like any other company, especially 20 employee startups. Trying to apply their recipes to 99% of companies is solving problems that don't exist and most likely creating new ones you don't need to deal with.

lapcat 3y ago
Related: The Carrot Problem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37100226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37100226

7e 3y ago

For all of this, Google doesn’t create very good products anymore. This is a guide that came into being _after_ Google was successful. It’s not _why_ Google became successful. Yes, if you have a mountain of money and a horde of underutilized employees, it’s easy to gold plate your engineering and navel-gaze at your biases.

x86x87 3y ago
It depends how you look at it. A lot of products created by Google were good/high quality but were killed anyway. It's sad to see things being killed because they were not "big enough".
- natch 3y ago
  The ones that were not killed are atrociously shoddy and have been now for, you’d think I was going to say years, but it’s actually decades.
  - philote 3y ago
    I feel like even their main products are shoddy as well. How can they recommend good, relevant ads if they can't even recommend good news articles, music, or videos? If I do any search in Google on a topic, even if it's just to get a tiny bit of info about that topic, Google decides I'm interested in it and will make recommendations based on that one, single search. Or sometimes I'll buy a product and start seeing ads for similar products later. That's not good targeting IMO.
phendrenad2 3y ago
Whenever I watch/read interviews with people who were successful in some way, they usually downplay the ugly hacks and shortcuts they took to get there, and are quick to say that they "should have done it <the right way>". It's really hard to get any insights because of this inherently unreliable narration.
- WorldMaker 3y ago

water-your-self 3y ago

How have layoffs impact group psychological safety?

x86x87 3y ago
I think they hit pretty hard. I remember some hardcore arguments with buddies that work at google when I told them that based on google's behavior layoffs are going to happen (this was 3-6 months before google did their first layoffs in history). I was brushed off with "google would not do that" and "our culture us different". It was heartbreaking to hear how their view on google transformed after layoffs did happen.
UncleMeat 3y ago
Not good. I've seen people rapidly shift to career protection, wagon-circling, and empire building. I've seen more competition for leading junior people since there are fewer new hires coming in. But mostly I've seen the company become more cynical towards executives. Depending on your feelings on AI, you might see new excitement and opportunity opening up or further meddling and messy product management in the future. I'm not sure where I land here yet. I think Google is still a very good place to work. Pay is high. WLB is great (at least where I sit). Tooling is very good. I haven't had any asshole managers or directors. But I definitely find it hard to get people excited about taking a big risk or maintain a project that is important but somehow misaligned with what your VP cares about.

idk1 3y ago

Is the culture section being 100% blank a very wry joke about there being no culture or a mistake? https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/part2.html https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/part2.html

sowbug 3y ago
Neither. Each part -- Thesis, Culture, Processes, Tools, etc. -- has its own heading. The formatting of the table of contents does not convey it well.

suyash 3y ago

A book on software engineering but totally missing how decisions are made around what features to build, what bugs to fix. I would have love to read more on how Google engineers prioritise work, what makes them more creative in terms of building innovative features and products. Also would have love to read how UI engineering is done while working with designers etc.

namdnay 3y ago
What you’re describing sounds more like a book on product management?
- natch 3y ago
  Yeah but ideally some PM spirit should also be built into a good developer culture so they can fill any PM gaps when needed, imho.
  - kaycebasques 3y ago
    To add to your point, I think what they said about technical writing might also apply to product management: > It introduced a perverse incentive: become an important project and your software engineers won’t need to write documents. Discouraging engineers from writing documents turns out to be the opposite of what you want to do. Because they are a limited resource, technical writers should generally focus on tasks that software engineers don’t need to do as part of their normal duties. Usually, this involves writing documents that cross API boundaries. Project Foo might clearly know what documentation Project Foo needs, but it probably has a less clear idea what Project Bar needs. A technical writer is better able to stand in as a person unfamiliar with the domain. In fact, it’s one of their critical roles: to challenge the assumptions your team makes about the utility of your project. It’s one of the reasons why many, if not most, software engineering technical writers tend to focus on this specific type of API documentation. PMs are a scarce resource. A lot of eng teams within Google don't have a dedicated PM and need to carve out product-market fit for themselves. When you have a dedicated PM it's easier to offload all PM ideas and responsibilities to that person. (I'm a technical writer at Google. The boilerplate "all opinions my own" is important in this convo because I think a lot of TWs and PMs will strongly disagree with these ideas.)

jroseattle 3y ago

If this document is intended as a how-google-does-it for applicability outside of Google, then the leadership section (Ch9) should include a heavy dose of your-mileage-may-vary. It is very good advice, but requires great cultural and executive support. All the adages listed here make perfect sense, but they don't succeed in a vacuum. Servant leadership is great, until individuals disagree with product strategy and priorities. Addressing low performers is great, until a company's HR policies make doing so onerous. I could go on, but there are often many things outside of your control as a leader that directly affect your capability to manage. It's all part of the job and something to account for, but set your expectations accordingly.

zinsn1 3y ago

Found it here how Google Engineering Career Ladder is structured: https://labs.revelo.com/template/google-google-software-engineering-ic-ladder-249 https://labs.revelo.com/template/google-google-software-engi...

neilv 3y ago
https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&track...
systemBuilder 3y ago
That's mostly propaganda, like most companies, Google has a policy of something like 5x-10x fewer people at every level as you go up the management chain, and they enforce that policy in preference and use these sugar-coated candy-cane level guidance documents to hide their sleaze.

andsoitis 3y ago

The Beyoncé Rule More colloquially, this is phrased as “If you liked it, you should have put a CI test on it,” which we call “The Beyoncé Rule."13 From a scaling perspective, the Beyoncé Rule implies that complicated, one-off bespoke tests that aren’t triggered by our common CI system do not count.

ajross 3y ago
Pet peeve: There's an anticorrolary though, which is that tests written solely for the requirements of an elaborate CI system tend to hurt and not help. Tests need to be trivially executable and inspectable by developers running on their own systems with minimal support. If they aren't, then all you know is that "It's Broken!" and not how to fix it. Good CI is good because it easily integrates "one-off bespoke tests", not because it outlaws them.
- joshuamorton 3y ago
  This is a non-sequitor I think. A bad ci system is independent from the mandate that, functionally "unless we can verify we don't break you, you can't complain when we do".
  - ajross 3y ago
    No? The two statements at hand equate to: "Do not add features to the product without adding validation to CI" and "Do not write validation steps CI just to add features to the product". Those are pretty clearly related concepts. And the reason for the disconnect is that the former centers the requirements of integration and not development, which is exactly backwards. CI isn't "the place where you run tests". The place where you run tests is underneath the software developers' fingers. CI is where you integrate tests developers are already running. And to the extent that is not true, CI stops being a useful tool for development and turns into just another roadblock to evade.
    - joshuamorton 3y ago
      > No? The two statements at hand equate to: "Do not add features to the product without adding validation to CI" and "Do not write validation steps CI just to add features to the product". Those are pretty clearly related concepts. Only if your CI and developer workflow are different. To a first approximation, at Google, I run `blaze test //foo` to test `foo`, and CI invokes the same command when testing `foo`. There's caveats here, but they don't apply to the beyonce rule in practice, which is centered on unit tests that can be run hermetically on presubmit. Your weird 3-hour integration test won't be run. Edit: Actually it seems like you're saying "once you've tested a feature once, you can release it", which...no. You need some way of ensuring you don't regress, the CI suite is how you do that, otherwise no one will know when the new release of some random open source library that you depend on breaks your application.

siliconc0w 3y ago

IMO bang for buck is to invest in: * reproducible fast dev environments - anyone should be able to build anything pretty easily fairly quickly * culture of design reviews, testing, and code reviews. * CI/CD, static analysis, PaaS, dependency management. You can do all of these without Google-level or really any bespoke tooling. A lot of what google builds is for operating at Google scale - distributed builds and running of huge applications - and even then this tooling this simply enables working at this scale, it comes with a lot of cost(speed/complexity) and jank you don't need at smaller software shops.

renecito 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago
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syngrog66 3y ago

When I see the font and color contrast scheme on that page I nope aborted fast. and dont tell me I can override it in my browser. Neither my Android phone or Android Chrome honors my expressed wish to override everything with a high contrast, dark theme. A few honor it, many apps and docs do not. That article does not.

deleted 3y ago
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jimbooonooo 3y ago

Cool, is this available as a PDF?

neilv 3y ago
"https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/209970024/software-engineering-at-google/titus-winters/ https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/209970024/software-enginee..." includes PDF and EPUB formats. (I bought it, intending it as interview prep for an experienced engineer interview, but seems they are doing student-startup-style Leetcode interviews.)

esafak 3y ago

Google is not what it used to be but this book is great. So much distilled wisdom.

very_good_man 3y ago

When are we going to advance as an industry and stop worshiping these people? If you have a decade in control of the greatest internet business ever, go ahead and do exactly as Google has done. For anyone else, look inward for inspiration!

carabiner 3y ago

Is there a reason to emulate google if your company is not trying to become an adtech behemoth? Google just sells ads, and has not originated a successful product besides search. They have an endless stream of failed pursuits, and so this could be a guidebook on inefficiency and exploratory tangents that don't produce value. That's why they laid off 12,000 employees since this guide was written. If anything, companies should try to follow Apple's workflow, which hasn't had layoffs and has a track record of elegant software that produces value in new areas.

salil999 3y ago
What a narrow minded view. This post and book has nothing to do with the product side of Google. You can argue about their products failing to gain traction in the market. But it's clear that Google is a leader in the software engineering industry. They have launched tons of tools and paradigms which has changed the way the entire software engineering industry works.

lhorie 3y ago

I'm stumbling into this thread right after experiencing what appears to be a pretty catastrophic failure of Google's main product. As I write this, the search results for "Google stock" (among other queries) returns zero results ("Your search - google stock - did not match any documents"). I'm not really sure what to make out of these discussions about how X or Y Google engineering is, while the production service is broken for an end user like me.

roody15 3y ago
The decline of google’s search engine has really been dramatic. It honestly is just a poor product at this point and I find myself having to use yandex, bing and variety of other tools now to find what I am looking for. My guess is that between SEO companies and Google just trying to maximize ad profits the product is in terminal decline
- systemBuilder 3y ago
  They really don't give a shit how many search engineers they drive away with 50+-hour weeks and their endless criticism. When it became uncool to have Google Search on your resume in 2018, I left.
alex_lav 3y ago
I’ve been unable to “Mark as read” in GMail for two years now.
crazygringo 3y ago
Searching for "Google stock" shows me correct results. A stock chart followed by various search results. There's no news of a widespread Google failure. Maybe you have a browser extension interfering? Or there's some kind of very localized hiccup. In any case, your experience right now isn't even close to representative. For its scale and complexity, Google search is probably one of the most reliable services ever built.
- bradley13 3y ago

oweiler 3y ago

Great book, a modern classic IMHO

nerdchum 3y ago

I thought that the more high status the company would indicate better technology stacks and better quality of engineering.... but all the high status seems to do is pull in people who are really good at politics and doing promotion based development which is kind of counter to the science aspect of computer science.

commandlinefan 3y ago
I've consistently gotten the impression that the difference between high performing organizations like Google and less high-performing organizations is that Google doesn't just _say_ they do this stuff, they actually do it, too. (Or, at least, they used to).
- nerdchum 3y ago
  > "High performing" I havent really see Google doing any innovation in about a decade or more? What have they done significant since maps and android over a decade ago? Apple stomping them in hardware, openai stomping them in AI, AWS stomping them in cloud, Nvidia stomping them on game streaming. Google has a monopoly on a big ad network at its core and thats not high performing or innovative.

w10-1 3y ago

As a counterpoint to the engineering/product/culture comments providing context on the book, I would point out that Urs Hölzle has recently stepped back from uber-manager to individual contributor in the infrastructure space. This is the guy who built the hotspot JIT that added decades to the life of Java, and who engineered Google's data centers and GCP. He obviously doesn't need more money or glory or experience, so ... why? There are a million examples of things gone wrong, but it may be worth studying one example of how someone could have such an impact and still just love what he's doing.

iaseiadit 3y ago
Did he have any involvement in this book? He’s not an author and not in the acknowledgments: https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/pr01.html#_acknowledgments https://abseil.io/resources/swe-book/html/pr01.html#_acknowl...
pclmulqdq 3y ago
Are we thinking about the same Urs? His reputation was not particularly good when I was in the TI group at Google recently. He also had nothing to do with this book.

SNosTrAnDbLe 3y ago

Google is not a good example to look at if you are thinking about enterprise software as these need to be supported long term and Google is not very good at that. They have a history of making breaking changes and discontinuing products. Microsoft is a much better example for business software as they are (were?) paranoid about backward compatibility.

cratermoon 3y ago
You're confusing software engineering with corporate product support. You can have top-notch ongoing lifetimes for trash products. See for example SAP or anything Oracle.
- SNosTrAnDbLe 3y ago
  Product support is an integral part of enterprise software engineering. Product management does not know what adding a new feature or deprecating an old feature means. It is the responsibility of engineering to provide the dependency matrix. For example, engineering usually tells product, if you change feature A, then it will also affect feature B, C and Z. Otherwise you may end up with contract breaches and SLA violations. Product lifetime and providing incremental features is a big reason why SAP and Oracle have been successful in the enterprise space and people still pay a lot of money to buy them.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    > SAP and Oracle have been successful in the enterprise space Yes, but are the well-engineered software?

coryfklein 3y ago

I've been listening to the audiobook and definitely recommend it to others. Also, it's free. [0] [0] https://www.audible.com/pd/Software-Engineering-at-Google-Audiobook/B08VLS9Y95 https://www.audible.com/pd/Software-Engineering-at-Google-Au...

DeathMetal3000 3y ago

Official PDF on github: https://github.com/abseil/abseil.github.io/blob/a5168e886917031023a2757cf9ce8faef422fbd9/resources/swe_at_google.2.pdf https://github.com/abseil/abseil.github.io/blob/a5168e886917...

appleflaxen 3y ago

> Part I. Thesis ...and then it's blank. Am I missing something?

lapcat 3y ago
Yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37121599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37121599

systemBuilder 3y ago

Most people will misinterpret what this book really is. Most people will think, "Hmm if I read this book I can start another google." Nothing could further from the truth. This is a book about how to run a gigantic software organization once it gets huge, rich, and sclerotic. This book has no insight into how to start another Google. The only insight is into where will you end up if your startup ends up huge, rich, and sclerotic, like Google.

sharts 3y ago

People seem to blindly worship Google too much. There have always been good ideas in engineering but because Google has the money to implement them at scale they get all of the credit. Testing, reproducibility, etc. These have always been common sense. It's just that people only adopt them when the big guys do it because we implicitly give authority to those with money and power. It's not different than when you see folks making videos of "How a millionaire structures his time." Like, wtf. Those ideas existed before the millionaire. Many people already practice those. And those alone are not what made the millionaire.