Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

Engineering from >10 years ago seems like it was a wild west. Some truly stunning pieces of technology, strung together with duct tape. Everything had its own configuration language, workflow engine, monitoring solution, etc. Deployments were infrequent, unreliable, and sometimes even done from a dev's machine. I don't want to disparage engineers who worked there during that time, the systems were amazing, but everything around the edge seemed pretty disparate, and I suspect gave rise to the "promo project" style development meme.

Nowadays we've got Boq/Pod, the P2020 suite, Rollouts, the automated job sizing technologies, even BCID. None of these are perfect by any means, but the convergence is a really good thing. I switched team, PA, and discipline 6 months ago, and it was dead easy to get up and running because I already knew the majority of the tech, and most of that tech is pretty mature and capable.

Maybe Google has become more like other tech companies (although I doubt they have this level of convergence), but I think people glorify the old days at Google and miss that a lot of bad engineering was done. Just one example, but I suspect Google has some of the best internal security of any software company on the planet, and that's a very good thing, but it most certainly didn't have that back in the day.

It was a real mistake, SRE is hugely stressful and really unrewarding compared to SWE. Yes you learn some skills and get some occasional glory, but year after year of fighting fires really didn't build any long lasting career.

After switching back to SWE I've finally got promotions and pay rises again, as well as good night sleep and much less stress.

I ask this question here because there seem to be quite some (ex-)Google employees in this thread.

It's like the fourth time I read/hear this. I understand that it's a tricky one to adress.

I am one of those engineers who do not care about culture as long as I am getting paid for the efforts I put in. Google in that sense beat others by HUGE margin.

The engineering work was however very different. We focused on right engineering solutions instead of just business aspect. While that kind of attitude hurts us in short term, it pays big in long term.

Whoah, it seems fantastic! That alone seems like a good reason to work for Google. Unfortunately, none of the companies I worked for was interested in less than 100%. I told them many times, you can keep your money, I just want to spend 20% or 30% less time at work, but they always insisted on 100%. I have a feeling they would go for 120% if legally allowed.

I'd love to know how in a fast paced office environment you can improve those, none of the trainings or anything are about this (even the leadership like ones feel like just standardized template stuff rather than actually have an environment where you can practice social skills and get the correct timely feedback to improve it)

How much, do you think?

There is nothing all that special about Google. Maybe there was twenty years ago, but that ship has long since sailed. It’s just another large US tech company. Like Microsoft and IBM before it.

However, during recent years I have turned into a Google hater. He does not mention any of those aspects. Google is an evil business IMHO. They are an advertising company. The challenges for this planet are sustainability. The goal of advertising is to waste resources. I can type this on a low end phone that soon turns 10. It works perfectly, except that no recent Android version is supported. Google is in the business that cores and memory have been doubled several times since then, for no benefit to mankind. And phones are far from the only category, advertisement is about selling a lot of stuff that does not bring any true improvement in quality of life. Video is one of the worst energy wasters in computing. 90% of Youtube is useless crap, not worth destroying the planet. Nobody would pay a realistic price for it. They are an ugly oligopolist. The list could go on and on...

Slight OT: what do people recommended for simple server & db monitoring (for a small saas business)?

monit, nagios, victoria metrics, etc?

Lots maybe. But if it's under 8 figures before the dot, it's not tons.

Is Google really different from other companies? I talk to a lot of Amazonians (AWS Hero, FreeBSD/EC2 maintainer) and my general impression is that developers below L7 ought to be classified as "Junior" -- my mapping is basically L4-L6 = Junior Developer, L7/L8 = Developer, and L10 = Senior Developer. Anything which doesn't have L7+ involvement gives me major "these kids need adult supervision" vibes for all the newbie mistakes they make.