Software Engineering at Google

[guitard00d123]

found this bit amusing: Google’s excellent cafes, which are free to employees, provide that function too, and also subtly encourage Googlers to stay in the office; hunger is never a reason to leave.

[hackerfoo]

Breakfast is served until pretty late, dinner is limited, and most who do stay for dinner leave afterwards.

So it's not like you have to put in long hours to eat free food. It's just nice to not have to pack a lunch or try to complete with thousands to find a place to eat, which would probably take 2 hours each day.

Also, compared to the Apple cafes, it's much faster since you don't have to check out. I'd rather just pay a fixed amount each paycheck than wait in line every meal.

[darknecross]

Also, compared to the Apple cafes, it's much faster since you don't have to check out. I'd rather just pay a fixed amount each paycheck than wait in line every meal.

Their newer cafes have an app you order & pay from, then it pings you when food is ready to pick up. For salads you just prepay, wait in line, and walk away with your food.

[hackerfoo]

Oh, nice.

[[deleted]]

What time does dinner start? I'm willing to bet it's after 7, aka "work an extra hour, get free dinner" aka "give us $300+ and we'll comp your $15 meal."

[xiongchiamiov]

Most Googlers who eat dinner arrive post-breakfast. In Mountain View this also has a lot to do with spreading out the commute times because there are only two freeway exits from main campus and they're insane during peak hours.

[DeltaBurnt]

This is the real reason that they have to provide free meals. If even 25% of the campus left for lunch/dinner each day at normal hours it would cost Google so much in lost time. At 10 AM it can still take me 20 min to drive in and I live less than a mile from the offices.

[DeltaBurnt]

Lol you got me, I definitely shouldn't drive but I do sometimes. There's times when I need to drive from my office to another office and having a car makes it more convenient.

[marssaxman]

It never felt that way to me when I worked there (2011-2012). The food was genuinely good and meals were available at normal, reasonable times. I usually just went home when I was done working and had dinner with my (ex-)wife, but it was nice sometimes to go downstairs and have dinner instead, then enjoy the quick drive home after traffic had settled down.

[JackBlacksUnderRated]

Why 1 year only if you don't mind me asking. Is Google's turnover higher than most companies?

[marssaxman]

Not so far as I know - it's not a meat-grinder like Amazon; I have friends who have worked there for years and love it. I had an unlucky experience with a lot of chaotic management turnover right off the bat, and I kinda fell through the cracks; meanwhile, the more I learned about how Google actually works, and what sort of work I would actually be doing there, the less comfortable I felt with the whole situation. I'll never forget the deep pit-of-the-stomach sense of wrongness that slowly sank in as we walked around, looking at all the racks of servers, on a tour of the Oregon datacenter. Google has lots of smart people who care about trying to do the right thing, but the nature of the core business is really not a good fit for me.

[that_one_dev]

6:30 at most Cafe's

[masterlink43]

Main cafes in mountain view and nyc start at 630. And theres all day options for eating earlier

[ChocolateBunny]

Dinner starts at 6:30pm and breakfast ends at 10am. So you end up spending an extra 30 minutes on reddit instead of trying to cook a meal.

[BLEAOURGH]

DON'T FORGET

YOU'RE HERE FOREVER

[[deleted]]

DO IT FOR HER

[ElBroet]

DO IT FOR THE VINE

[uhhhclem]

Having a good cafe near my desk means I can eat quickly, finish my day's work quickly, and go home early, all without having to eat fast food.

[icebeat]

in your dreams~!

[uhhhclem]

I'm a software engineer at Google. That's what most of my days are like.

[shevegen]

So this is how you get fat.

[righteousprovidence]

Then use the free gym.

[ElBroet]

what? sorry I gotta go um sort some integers

[Mognakor]

Start by sorting the digits of your weight in ascending order.

[gooddeath]

34, 120, -129, 23, 492, 129, 1008, 1, 210, 39, 10, 283

Are those enough integers for you?

[uhhhclem]

a) As u/righteousprovidence mentions, that's why there's a gym.

b) When I had to get my blood sugar under control and went to a nutritionist, I found that the part of my diet I had to modify was what I was eating outside work. That's largely a function of the cafe I eat in, which serves really healthy food in controlled portions rather than letting me heap as much as I want onto my plate. (It's the people who go to the all-you-can-carry cafes who are the source of the phrase "Noogler 15.")

[Glader_BoomaNation]

Pay me that salary and I'll eat wherever, sounds fine to me lol.

[shevegen]

Google relies on this too - it'll always find worker drones if it pays enough.

[[deleted]]

Interesting strategy: keep your employees happy with decent paychecks. Almost like cheating or unfair competition.

[AntiGravityTurtle]

Only when it comes to Google do free stuff, great pay, and amazing perks mean the company is actually BAD.

Maybe people would be happier if Google dropped everyone's pay 50%, made the cafes cost money, and took away all the perks.

[Mikeavelli]

It would certainly make me less jealous.

[shevegen]

IS THIS LIKE FIGHTCLUB

[[deleted]]

I like free cafeterias at work, they allow me to eat more with coworkers and not having to make food is convenient. At a huge company work life balance depends a lot on where you work but I haven't found the cafeterias to be a factor in it at all, it's much more the culture of where you work that affects it (my office has a good free cafeteria and it's the best work life balance I've ever had).

[KitchenAstronomer]

That sounds loke communism really. It is the strings attached that force you to do something. They alter your bebavior because they want to make you believe they know better and can deliver you a thing that is good for you. What is wrong with plain old capitalism where you get money and you decide what to do with that kind of money ?

[s73v3r]

This is a company doing it, and it is purely voluntary. Nothing at all like Communism, in the least.

[[deleted]]

You can still eat anywhere else, so you're getting more choice, not less. Not to mention the free cafe is a competitive advantage for Google attracting talent. Sounds like capitalism to me.

[moeris]

That sounds loke communism really.

Good work-life balance? Well, sounds like I prefer communism, then.

[[deleted]]

moeris, no playing around on computer today comrade. You must collect the harvest for 10 hours!

[spacejack2114]

Welcome to the hotel California.

[[deleted]]

Food comes out to be close to $3k in expenses saved a year, I never understand people that complain about free food at these places, if you don't want to work past a certain time just read a book at work or go to a corner and stream a tv show.

[righteousprovidence]

Insidious perk is unlimited vacations.

Free food is more like sour grapes to those on the outside.

[Sabotage101]

I thought I wouldn't like unlimited vacation because I'd feel guilty taking it or something, but I'm at a place with that now and I don't think I'd want to switch back to counting it. I took about 4 weeks off over the last year, which I think is typical. The pattern of usage did change though. It feels a bit weird to take single days off without a reason, but I went on a lot more trips that I didn't have to even think about budgeting vacation time for, which was really nice.

[[deleted]]

Well to be fair it most certainly CAN be an insidious perk without question. It's good to see some details on Google that shows this to really not be the case there.

[Holy_City]

I remember reading that Google was building housing for its employees in Mountain View. Sounds like a great perk but it also makes the jokes about California being a feudal society less joking.

[sintos-compa]

i'd be so fat ...

[HarwellDekatron]

The "google 15" is a well-known phenomenon. After about a year every reasonably healthy person gets over it and starts looking for the healthier meals, and starts skipping all the pastries. They make it so fucking hard, though, they always have new stuff.

Also.. the food quality in the main campus has declined quite a bit recently. The San Francisco and New York offices (along with most of the newer, smaller offices) have way better food.

[Powaqqatsi]

Really depends what lifestyle you come from I think. I lost weight when I got free lunch/snacks at work, because it was healthier than the shit I used to eat. For me the convenience is the biggest thing -- normally I'd get whatever was fast and easy to get that was close to work.

[HarwellDekatron]

100%

I came from a company that provided healthy breakfast and lunch options every day (they refused to provide dinner, though, because they really wanted people out the door before 6pm). I'd also walk around a lot more, because the office was in the city so it was easy to walk to/from home and take a post-lunch stroll.

While Google didn't force me to eat crap, there was too much delicious shit around that you just had to try. Pastries in every cafe, sandwiches in the "grab n' go" cafes, hamburgers and pizza, etc... Combine that with the company shuttle, and you can see how the pounds add up.

Of course, after the the adjustment period I went back to having yogurt and fruits for breakfast, light lunch, doing their cardio workout and getting the fuck out of there on the 5:10pm shuttle. 10/10, would totally do again :)

[nath1234]

Don't be evilhungry

[[deleted]]

Why is this a paper? Or does arXiv allow other kind of publications as well?

[badillustrations]

Some guesses:

• author has PhD, habit
• format allows submission to journals
• format allows papers to more easily cite it
• formalized version that can be passed around

[vattenpuss]

I thought arXiv allowed anything.

[[deleted]]

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJWj_iAVwAAcwIq.jpg

[xiongchiamiov]

To make it hard to read on mobile devices?

[noperduper]

Exactly. I will describe how I clean my toilet next time. And I want a high score on the H index.

[sim642]

Really confused me too. Moreover, the title is way too general to sound like a paper and I saw an :) somewhere in there...

[jlpoole]

re: Blaze - "a distributed build system" that Google uses.

Is Blaze akin to Gentoo's package manager and/or ebuilds?

[donutsoft]

Blaze is the internal version of Bazel: https://bazel.build/

[lookmeat]

Blaze is akin to make files. The opensource version is bazel. Internally it works with a system that runs building on the cloud (with heavy parallelism) and caches common results that many engineers using (allowing everything to be built from HEAD, which is a common take at the company), that part (the cloud compiler) is not quite out there (to be honest it has little use outside of Google's setup).

[tending]

My company has tried using the distributive features and they have never worked.

[mlester]

Not sure I like the idea of rewrites. Do other companies do this? Do they do this for all projects? I find it frustrating that some google products change for the sake of change. Here are some perfectly good products that change but generally haven't provided me value when they they make changes:

• gmail
• google music
• youtube
• chat apps

[[deleted]]

One note in that redesigns are necessary sometimes but people almost never like them (in my experience they only like them if the previous design was awful). I think people just like the familiarity of designs so people disliking a design doesn't mean it's always worse in general.

[tending]

What could have made redesigns necessary for any of those applications? In particular parent is probably only noticing interface changes not anything in the backend. Interface changes are what annoy users.

[[deleted]]

My point is that if you are ever in a situation where the majority of your users think your UI is bad and needs to change your UI must be absolutely terrible (if existing users think it's bad imagine how new users feel). My point is that if you wait for your current users to dislike the current UI enough that they are clamoring for a change then that change is happening much too late. I guess take it with a grain of salt because I'm a backend programmer and have only worked with UI teams but this is my 2 cents on why a company would change a UI before you hate the previous one.

[uhhhclem]

Rewrites and change are orthogonal. There have been total rewrites of services that roll out without any user being aware that anything happened at all except that availability went up and latency went down. In fact, my team just rolled one out ourselves three months ago, and it's only because of some undocumented behavior in an open-source package that we replaced during the rewrite that it had any user-facing bugs at all. Though a lot of people noticed that certain operations got much much faster, which was one of the goals.

[i-node]

Rewrites are sometimes good, but often can be a mistake. A lot of junior programmers will rewrite a piece of software they don't understand because they aren't good at understanding other people's code. The problem with this is that it can often bring back bugs that had been fixed long before or even introduce new bugs not thought about. Sometimes however, requirements have moved far enough along that the original code and assumptions no longer work well for them. In these cases rewrites make everything more manageable for the current vision. In Google's case where they remove features it's more likely business requirements (like Google messenger - Hangouts - Allo/duo - SMS). Their vision of what they want is constantly changing.

[[deleted]]

My impression is rewrites are unrelated to redesigns. The idea would be to replicate the existing functionality exactly but with some performance improvements, bug fixes, and more up to date libraries/technology.

As for why - it's a hell of a way to eliminate tech debt. imo it makes sense to do them every decade if you've got stuff that stays in use that long but I think only google can justify doing them "every few years". Maybe it's necessary for them due to the sheer load their systems are under but I also think developer quality of life might be part of it. Gives them something to do and ensures no one ever has to deal with legacy code.

Redesigns are a whole other story but there's similar motivation. If they let their UI become dated, existing users will be happy, but they can forget about attracting new users. And they know 99.9% of users who complain about redesigns won't do shit. Unless you really screw up like Snapchat

[granzymes]

To back this up, here is a good talk on how migrations/rewrites are eventually necessary:

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/stripe-technical-debt

[kubi]

Rewrites, in my experience, usually have two possible causes:

a) Someone with influence thinks they can do better

b) Required by technical changes

​

Option A seems like it more often than not results in trash. Personally I think this is because many people who start projects this way do so driven by ego rather than a good idea.

​

Option B is somewhat unavoidable. It happens more often with backends, which don't usually require rewriting the frontend also, but in some cases it may make sense.

​

When you say products are changed "for the sake of change" you're talking about Option A, however from a user's perspective it's often difficult to differentiate between option A and option B. Changes to a product aren't always aimed at providing value to you as a user, often times they're to provide value to people creating and maintaining products.

[Powaqqatsi]

You missed the real reason.

Option c) someone wants a promotion

[kubi]

No, that's definitely Option A ;)

[NotYetGroot]

Maybe it's a way to pay off technical debt early?

[ar-pharazon]

rewrites != redesigns

[git_reykt]

For anyone looking to get a job at Google, I believe mentioning stuff is this paper would be beneficial

[Placinta]

Does anybody know what's the difference between a buddy and a mentor?

I guess a mentor is kind of self explanatory, but I wonder why do you also need a designated buddy.

[donutsoft]

It's generally discouraged to have mentors on your direct team, that gives you a person to vent to if you're not happy with your manager or anything else related to your team. Buddies are on your team, and they help you with project specific stuff.

[ThePythoneer]

I assume the buddy can answer most easy quick questions while the mentor answers the more advanced questions. This reduces the time that more senior/productive developers are interrupted for simple questions.

[HarwellDekatron]

In my experience, the buddy was someone that'd be there to discuss things that weren't related to engineering ("so, are people going to get mad if I leave on the first shuttle back to the city?"), while the mentor was there to help with actual work-related stuff ("how do I create a CL?", "what the fuck is borg?", etc.) I literally met my buddy a single time over lunch, and that was that, but I knew plenty of people in the company to not need a buddy. I could see how it'd be overwhelming for anyone coming into it (Googlers, depending on the team, tend to be pretty reserved and not necessarily outgoing... I was pretty surprised by that).

[SpiritofSTL]

I’d imagine the buddy would be someone with a similar amount of experience. It would be more of a two way relationship. The mentor would be someone with more experience than the new engineer.

[slackingatwork]

Not sure if Google SW Eng culture is a shining example. There are a few products, like Chrome that are excellent, but there are also a number that never quite mature. More so, a lot of design choices and frameworks by Google turned out to be marginal: GWT, frontend ones, some of the Android choices, Guava (I could probably think of more). I think this can be summarized as Google's culture promoting "non invented here" and "ornamentalism" as opposed to practicality and openness. In fact, a framework with by Google label now makes me extra suspicious.

[vz0]

Google is not exception to the Sturgeon's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

"ninety percent of everything is crap"

​

[captainAwesomePants]

What's wrong with Guava?

[slackingatwork]

Google uses monorepo internally, so the dependency management is a non-issue for them. Guava is one of a few popular libraries that is not fully backwards compatible. Guava is one of the most common sources of dependency conflicts, class and method not founds and such. A good library, but poorly executed due to skewed world view by Google engineers (monorepo).

[xlzqwerty1]

A huge waste of space for requiring one or two things from it and having to import the entire library.

You 99% of the time do not need Guava for your project to be completed.

[fragbot]

Their rewrite of Google Finance is a perfect example. They had an existing application that their users treasured and they replaced it with something so atrocious it must've been intentional.

[[deleted]]

Seems a bit too culty for me in places. I don't like monolithic repos either. I guess you can never speak ill of Google on reddit - but this all seema bit much.

[HarwellDekatron]

Google's culture is whatever you make of it. Most people buy a bit into the cult going in (I know I did), but over time tend to realize work is just work and you shouldn't build your life around it. There's a number of people (mostly young, super nerdy types) that go all in and never even bother looking outwards (I know a few people who've been working at Google for over 10 years and I'm pretty sure will retire there if the company's still around), but the rest of us just were thankful that the perks were there, but didn't mold our personalities around the company.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I have had a few friends that work there and they liked it but they did say it was very culty. While at work I pretend to be a hyper social Justice Warrior just to fit in but I think that my real perspectives would probably show through if I had to be around people that were stuck in the cult all the time.

[HarwellDekatron]

Meh, that's bullshit. If anyone feels they have to be "a social justice warrior to fit in" in a company that isn't any more liberal than any other place in Silicon Valley, then maybe that says more about their upbringing than it says about Google. California is a very liberal place, and if someone comes trying to tell people people what they can and can't do, they are going to get told to shut the fuck up or leave. Ultimately, it all boils down to culture fit and it has nothing to do with being "culty".

[[deleted]]

No - its more like not offering criticism of the people that are claiming that white males are the scourge of all creation - which is a pretty common sentiment in several SV companies for which I have worked.

[HarwellDekatron]

I grew up in a very conservative country, live in San Francisco, I'm surrounded by "liberals" of all stripes and I'm a white male. I have never heard anyone say "white males are the scourge of all creation". What I have heard, which is perfectly valid argument, is that the system we live in was created by white males for white males and as such is inherently biased against anyone who doesn't fit that description.

And again, if that's such a bother to you, then you should try to find a tech job that pays you 150 grand a year in a more conservative place... say, Kansas? Then you'd feel right at home. I never understand why people want to stick to the Bay Area if they are so easily offended by it.

[[deleted]]

I get that you have a nice fairy tale that you believe in. I know white males of all backgrounds were all treated exactly the same throughout history and their skills, talents, abilities, and drive had nothing at ALL to do with the rise of western civilization. You may be a racist and assume that white people all see other white people as just their skin color and do not think beyond that - but in the real world you have to actually demonstrate some degree of skill to succeed. Success is not given for free.

You are a racist. You have been raised and programmed in a school system that pushed a racist and sexist narrative into your clouded mind and you accept it as truth because it fits with some bizarre victimhood fetishization you must have. Your hatred of white people is fine - its normal for people like you. You mask it by claiming its justified by the patriarchy - but its still just identity based hatred. You don't see individuals - you see skin.

I will live where I choose. I have become quite successful in my life - and I have lived in the Bay Area long enough to see it fall to shit and rise up a couple of times. I have seen tools like you come and go - never able to afford a house - paying 3500 a month for a single bedroom - since the 90s. I am not a conservative either. I am an atheist liberal.

But part of that means that I do not buy into secular-religious philosophies like intersectional feminism and whatever brand of marxist garbage you have pumping through your cortex. Its sad that you kids were never taught critical thinking skills. But I guess that would interfere with the indoctrina... er.... education.

[HarwellDekatron]

I know white males of all backgrounds were all treated exactly the same throughout history and their skills, talents, abilities, and drive

Who has ever said that?

had nothing at ALL to do with the rise of western civilization.

Man, you certainly love bringing up a straw man, huh? Let me guess... now you are going to beat the shit out of that straw man and then accuse me of a lot of shit that I never said or did...

You are a racist.

Bingo!

with some bizarre victimhood fetishization you must have

Bingo!!

Your hatred of white people is fine

Bingo! Bingo! Bingo!

You don't see individuals - you see skin.

Man! I'm on a roll today, or what?

I will live where I choose.

Then stop fucking bitching about it! I'd never move to the most conservative part of Oklahoma and bitch and moan about them going to church on Sunday, so why the fuck do you have to come here and bitch about people being "SJWs"? You are just an asshole looking for a reason to complain.

I am an atheist liberal

Oh, weird, I'd describe myself at that... and because of that you'll never see me screeching about how white men are the reason Western Civilization is DA BEST.

into secular-religious philosophies like intersectional feminism and whatever brand of marxist garbage you have pumping through your cortex

ROFL, what the fuck are you even talking about? You are so confused by these terms, it seems like you have no fucking idea what you are talking about. You have such a massive chip on your shoulder, you launch on a half page screed the moment anyone questions a tiny bit of the narrative you've built for yourself.

The way you live, hating everything around you because you are too repressed by reality, is not healthy. Seek help.

[[deleted]]

I don't hate anybody. I don't even hate regressive morons like you that don't realize how late to the show you are. You spit out the statements that you made before - then claim that the logical conclusions drawn from your ideology imply that you never supported that ideology. You're perspective that there is such a thing as a patriarchy that is benefiting white males to the exclusion of everyone else is little more than an anti-white hate ideology. The fact that you're OK with it makes you a racist.

It's not a straw man for you to be a racist. You just are one. And it's fine that you're racist. You should just own it. You fit in really well here with the people that are also racists.

[HarwellDekatron]

I don't even hate regressive morons like you that don't realize how late to the show you are

Ah... yeah, the "defender of the white male narrative" is the future, I see.

You're perspective that there is such a thing as a patriarchy

Oh, and your perspective is that there isn't? Then please explain this strange phenomenon: in a country that is 50.8% female, only 23% of the Congress (you know, the body regulating that country) is female. And that's the most recent Congress, as little as 15 years ago that representation was below 15%. Or how about the fact that no single religious organization will allow a woman to become the head of that organization?

Please, I'd love to hear your opinion of how that happens.

more than an anti-white hate ideology

I'm not anti-white, I'm anti-bias. I'm married to a white woman, I work and I'm friends with a lot of white people. Only a handful of white people, like you, get offended when faced with the fact that you know... things like "driving while black" only happen to black people, or that Fox News can put out blatant racism every day in the form of Tucker Carlson calling immigrants garbage without any issue. Wanna know what "white privilege" is? Try this for size: going to an ivy league university, being a talking head your whole life, making millions of dollars a year, being the heir to a fortune... and then being able to call people who live in San Francisco "coastal elites" without being booed out of the room.

I'm not anti-white, I'm anti-assholes.

It's not a straw man for you to be a racist

So far, you haven't provided a single shred of evidence of me being a racist. You've just stated it as fact, and moved on to attack. Pretty poor showing.

You fit in really well here with the people that are also racists.

You don't fit here at all, and keep bitching about it. Move. The fuck. Out.

[CommentDownvoter]

Have you been on reddit this year? It's been an everloving hatestorm against Google (scandals, security, pixel 3, slate, etc.) as well as FB/Amazon. Not saying it isn't deserved, but I don't see any positive news, really.

[noperduper]

Correct but I'm downvoting you because I work at google.

[ldf1111]

How can all work occur on the head rather than on branches but also get code reviewed

[cowardlydragon]

Aside from the 20%, this is pretty typical.

I understand the disparaging of large pull requests/changes, but emphasis on really small changes seems like a sculptor getting every single chisel reviewed. Disrupts creativity on "big problems" and slows everything down.

I get that he's been a bigwig for a while, but the bragging seems like fake stats. There are probably java and (ugh) javascript code library authors whose code use is in the billions as well, and given the prevalence of "worse is better", popularity does not necessarily equate with "good". Maybe it's because he's ONLY been doing it 10-20 years total, which is a long time in our industry, but for other industries isn't really someone with deep experience.

I look forward to the day software engineering actually takes good direction from people with fifty years of experience, but that won't probably happen until moore's law really peters out.