Design docs culture and engineering-driven decision making

They discuss mandatory design docs, RFC practices, 20% time origins, and engineering-first culture trade-offs.

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What is it really like to be an engineer at Google?

In this special deep dive episode, we unpack how engineering at Google actually works. We spent months researching the engineering culture of the search giant, and talked with 20+ current and former Googlers to bring you this deepdive with Elin Nilsson, tech industry researcher for The Pragmatic Engineer and a former Google intern.

Google has always been an engineering-driven organization. We talk about its custom stack and tools, the design-doc culture, and the performance and promotion systems that define career growth. We also explore the culture that feels built for engineers: generous perks, a surprisingly light on-call setup often considered the best in the industry, and a deep focus on solving technical problems at scale.

If you are thinking about applying to Google or are curious about how the company’s engineering culture has evolved, this episode takes a clear look at what it was like to work at Google in the past versus today, and who is a good fit for today’s Google.

Jump to interesting parts:

(13:50) Tech stack

(1:05:08) Performance reviews (GRAD)

(2:07:03) The culture of continuously rewriting things

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(01:44) Stats about Google

(11:41) The shared culture across Google

(13:50) Tech stack

(34:33) Internal developer tools and monorepo

(43:17) The downsides of having so many internal tools at Google