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In this episode
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
For more reading on this topic, see our previous deepdive articles on Google’s engineering culture.
The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode
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
(45:29) Perks
(55:37) Engineering roles
(1:02:32) Levels at Google
(1:05:08) Performance reviews (GRAD)
(1:13:05) Readability
(1:16:18) Promotions
(1:25:46) Design docs
(1:32:30) OKRs
(1:44:43) Googlers, Nooglers, ReGooglers
(1:57:27) Google Cloud
(2:03:49) Internal transfers
(2:07:03) Rewrites
(2:10:19) Open source
(2:14:57) Culture shift
(2:31:10) Making the most of Google, as an engineer
(2:39:25) Landing a job at Google
References
Where to find Elin Nilsson:
• X: https://x.com/hejelinnilsson
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hejelin/
• Website: https://hejelin.github.io/
Mentions during the episode:
• What I Learned Getting Acquired by Google: https://shreyans.org/google
• What is Reliability Engineering?: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/reliability-engineering
• Borg: https://research.google/pubs/large-scale-cluster-management-at-google-with-borg/
• Kubernetes: https://kubernetes.io/
• The Production Environment at Google, from the Viewpoint of an SRE: https://sre.google/sre-book/production-environment/
• Jeff Bezos Was An Early Investor In Google — A Move That Could Have Made Him A Billionaire Outside Of Amazon. He Took A Gamble Because He Believed In The Founders: ‘I Just Fell In Love With Larry And Sergey’: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jeff-bezos-early-investor-google-185940547.html
• B4 and After: Managing Hierarchy, Partitioning, and Asymmetry for Availability and Scale in Google’s Software-Defined WAN: https://research.google/pubs/b4-and-after-managing-hierarchy-partitioning-and-asymmetry-for-availability-and-scale-in-googles-software-defined-wan/
• Site Reliability Engineering: https://sre.google/sre-book/table-of-contents/
• Piper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piper_%28source_control_system%29
• Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository: https://research.google/pubs/why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/
• Code Search: https://sourcegraph.com/code-search
• Efficient scaleups in 2024 vs 2021: Sourcegraph (with CEO & Co-founder Quinn Slack): https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/quinn-slack-efficient-scalups
• Bazel: https://opensource.google/projects/bazel
• Cider: https://code.google.com/archive/p/cider-ide/
• Tricorder: Building a Program Analysis Ecosystem: https://research.google/pubs/tricorder-building-a-program-analysis-ecosystem/
• Issue tracker: https://issuetracker.google.com/i
• GUTS: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vdkgroep.guts
• gRPC: a true internet-scale RPC framework is now 1.0 and ready for production deployments: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/grpc-a-true-internet-scale-rpc-framework-is-now-1-and-ready-for-production-deployments
• What I Hated about working at Google:
• NeetCode: https://neetcode.io/
• The man behind the Big Tech comics – with Manu Cornet: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-man-behind-the-big-tech-comics
• Welcome to Google comic: https://goomics.net/50
• Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/oncall-compensation/
• GRAD: https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/buildyourfuture/programs/grad
• Performance Calibrations at Tech Companies: Part 1: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/performance-calibrations
• Performance Calibrations at Tech Companies: Part 2: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/performance-calibrations-part-2
• Promotions and tooling at Google (with Irina Stanescu, Ex-Google): https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/promotions-and-tooling-at-google
• Why I Quit Google to Work for Myself: https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/
• Killed by Google: https://killedbygoogle.com/
• Side project time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side_project_time
• Software Engineering at Google: https://books.google.com/books?id=V3TTDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
• John Doerr on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-doerr-03248211/
• Measure What Matters: The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth: https://www.amazon.com/Measure-What-Matters-Simple-Drives/dp/024134848X
• App Engine: https://cloud.google.com/appengine
• Go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)
• Angular: https://angular.dev/
• Tensorflow: https://www.tensorflow.org/
• Attention is All You Need: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3f5ee243547dee91fbd053c1c4a845aa-Paper.pdf
• Chromium: https://www.chromium.org/
• Flutter: https://flutter.dev/
• Inside Fast’s Rapid Collapse: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-fast
• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/
• U.S. and Plaintiff States v. Google LLC and Apple Inc: https://www.justice.gov/atr/case/us-and-plaintiff-states-v-google-llc-and-apple-inc
• State of the software engineering job market in 2025: what the data says: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-the-tech-market-in-2025
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