Google Software Engineering Culture
In Google, the company’s culture is important to everyone. It is a crucial part of the work culture and helps set the tone for how software engineers interact with each other.
A key part of building a great engineering culture is ensuring everyone feels that they can participate in creating it. This can be done by holding meetings with every team member and asking them to propose ideas.
Customer-centricity
Customer-centricity is an important business strategy for any company. Brands that create a customer-focused culture tend to have higher revenues, lower expenses, and greater employee engagement.
To create a great customer-centric culture, leaders must empower and align employees to provide the best possible experiences for their customers. This requires an understanding that each person plays a role in customer-centricity and must be rewarded for their efforts.
One way to ensure customer-centricity is through communication. Every department should use all available channels to communicate regularly with customers and solicit feedback.
Google engineers often contribute to mailing lists, but a significant portion of their contribution is documentation and written knowledge that serves as an auditable trail of changes over time. Documentation does not have to be formal but should serve as an aide to learning by others.
Design docs
When you think of Google software engineering, you probably imagine consumer-facing products like Gmail and Maps. However, behind the scenes, a lot is going on. From massive databases to specialized storage systems, Google has some impressive infrastructure to make its products shine. But the show’s real stars are the slick and clever engineers who design, build, test and deploy all that magic. A great example is Auxon, a well-crafted asynchronous query system that helps Google keep up with the demands of modern-day ad serving and content delivery. The software is only a few years old but has accumulated a mind-boggling 1 million lines of code and is used by hundreds of thousands of engineers and customers.
Collaboration
In Google Software Engineering Culture, engineers are encouraged to work together to improve a product. They do this by sharing code and ensuring all team members access the same technology and practices.
In addition, they share knowledge and ideas, resulting in more creative solutions and better products. They also create a culture where each team can grow and adapt, making scale easier.
To encourage collaboration, Google invests in internal forums like YAQS that allow engineers to connect with peers. These platforms are important for avoiding miscommunications and enabling teams to share confidential information.
Mentorship
Mentorship is the process of fostering and developing an individual’s knowledge and skills. This can be done by teaching, mentoring, or offering guidance to a mentee.
The role of a mentor is crucial to an organization’s success. They help employees improve their performance, give them a voice in the workplace and encourage them to pursue growth opportunities.
Google’s mentoring program is a great example of this. It’s designed to help Google engineers navigate various topics, such as using Google infrastructure or navigating the company culture.
Research shows that mentorship has a high impact on student academic success. It also enhances employee engagement, linked to job satisfaction and retention.
Learning
Google engineers are expected to teach others through office hours, tech talks, or documentation. Expertise is not a binary state – it’s a multidimensional vector of what you know and how well you understand that knowledge (see Engineering for Equity). Learning is an integral part of Google’s culture. We encourage engineers to experiment, ask questions, and be wrong.
When engineers feel comfortable with this, they’re better able to take risks and learn new things quickly. This is a hallmark of Google culture and is highly effective in promoting productivity, creativity, and innovation.
To further support the culture of learning, Google has a variety of mechanisms in place to recognize and reward good behaviors at a systemic level. These include peer-to-peer awards and company-wide standards like performance reviews and promotion criteria.