The Pragmatic Engineer Google’s engineering culture
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Oct 15, 2025 Elin Nilsson, a tech industry researcher and former Google intern, shares an insider's look into Google's engineering culture. She discusses the custom tech stack that powers the giant and the unique tools like Borg and SRE. The conversation dives into the generous perks offered to engineers and the light on-call duty they experience. Elin also unveils the intriguing design docs culture and the promotion-driven development model. Finally, they reflect on the shifts in workplace culture since the pandemic, emphasizing adaptability and innovation.
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Custom Stack Built For Planet-Scale Search
- Google built a completely custom, vertically integrated tech stack because search required planet-scale infrastructure from day one.
- That investment produced Borg, Piper, Blaze and many internal tools which enable extreme developer productivity at Google.
Cheap Hardware Plus Automation Scaled Google
- Google traded expensive, monolithic servers for massive fleets of cheap commodity machines plus automation, enabling cost-effective scale.
- That hardware choice drove investments in orchestration, filesystem and monitoring innovations.
Monorepo Enables Company-Wide Reuse
- Google operates a single massive monorepo with distributed builds and integrated tooling to support billions of files and tens of thousands of commits per day.
- This enables cross-team code visibility, fast search, and company-wide reuse that few companies can match.
