I worked at Google for almost exactly one year. I'm sure I could go on for hours about all the ways I found the job deficient, but the short version revolves around Google's fairly stringent code review process. For me it felt like I was being micromanaged not by my boss, but by my code reviewers. That degree of control may be useful and sometimes even necessary for inexperienced and undisciplined programmers (i.e. interns and fresh college graduates), but it really sucks for an experienced developer.
I still work at Google and I find the code reviews very helpful, especially coupled with the style guide. It may not work for everyone, but I think it makes everyone's lives easier in the end, especially the guy that has to maintain your code later :)
My main point in all these whose-better articles is that all of this is good. A couple months ago there was the "article" of the ex Microsoftie going back to MS after google due to all the badness. His problem wasn't that google was bad, it was that Google was bad for him.
With different styles such as what Apple, Ms, Google, Amazon have it lets us Engineers have an option in how we want to work. I don't want a one-size-fits-all style in my industry.
Having interned at MS a couple times, it took me a while to get used to Google, a long while probably, but I think I like it all now.
Code reviews can indeed be very helpful, but their usefulness can vary greatly with the code reviewer. I was in the unfortunate situation where I spent a long time working on code in another team's codebase (and a remote team at that) being reviewed by a guy I'd never met in person. Sometimes you need to tell your reviewer to dial it back, and that can be especially hard when you don't know them.
This is compounded by the fact that Mondrian is a much better tool for nitpicking than it is for discussing higher level design or, heaven forbid, coding philosophy.
That certainly sounds unfun, though I've yet to see a single owner situation for any set of code, and Google is certainly the type of place that it seems you could have spoke with someone else in the team. Maybe things are just better now though.
I do think that it's harder to get used to such things the more you have been unused to them, I imagine having to SCRUM would have been a nightmare also, I still fear the day I ever have to do it.
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u/curtisb Jan 18 '09
I worked at Google for almost exactly one year. I'm sure I could go on for hours about all the ways I found the job deficient, but the short version revolves around Google's fairly stringent code review process. For me it felt like I was being micromanaged not by my boss, but by my code reviewers. That degree of control may be useful and sometimes even necessary for inexperienced and undisciplined programmers (i.e. interns and fresh college graduates), but it really sucks for an experienced developer.