Software Engineering at Google

Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time

By: Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, Hyrum Wright

Narrated by: Mark Sando

Newly adapted for audiobook listeners.

Today, software engineers need to know not only how to program effectively but also how to develop proper engineering practices to make their codebase sustainable and healthy. This book emphasizes this difference between programming and software engineering.

How can software engineers manage a living codebase that evolves and responds to changing requirements and demands over the length of its life? Based on their experience at Google, software engineers Titus Winters and Hyrum Wright, along with technical writer Tom Manshreck, present a candid and insightful look at how some of the world’s leading practitioners construct and maintain software. This book covers Google’s unique engineering culture, processes, and tools and how these aspects contribute to the effectiveness of an engineering organization.

You’ll explore three fundamental principles that software organizations should keep in mind when designing, architecting, writing, and maintaining code:

• How time affects the sustainability of software and how to make your code resilient over time
• How scale affects the viability of software practices within an engineering organization
• What trade-offs a typical engineer needs to make when evaluating design and development decisions

©2020 Google, LLC (P)2021 Upfront Books

Still useful at smaller Eng org sizes

Though this book lays out what Google does (a company with perhaps no comparison) a lot of the principles are generally applicable. I was pleasantly surprised by this and have found several applications for my own Eng org.

Works Well As An Audiobook

A lot of software engineering books can be difficult to understand in audiobook format because of reliance on code snippets or diagrams. But this book worked well. The chapters were clear and topical. The challenges and solutions were well articulated.

As a software engineer myself, I found the chapters on testing and dependencies particularly incisive. I hadn’t thought much about the limitations and lossy behavior of semantic versioning until reading this book.

Final nit and personal opinion: the narrator makes the content sound really stuffy and elitist. You kind of get used to it though, and the depth of content does make it worthwhile.

Surprisingly good as an audiobook

My main fear was that it wouldn’t not be very listenable as an audio book. But it is actually nice. Would definitely recommend to give it a try.

The content is cool too, though I noticed some minor things (such as saying “we at google” too often, which gets on nerves a little). The book gives a great overview of internal tooling, processes, and reasoning behind some decisions/approaches.

little bit didactic

It's IT wold. And that maybe because best practices so quickly copy by others. and that because "at Google" with such manner like "only at Google" not so anymore.

Excellent distillation of decades of experience

Excellent distillation of decades of experience creating and running a massive software enterprise. Highly recommended!

Details of a well run engineering group

Great book! Google has a lot of experience making software. With their size, they have had to explore every bit of waste that comes up in development. nice to hear the challenges they have are shared by smaller companies (I think, anyway), and to then hear how they dealt with it.

Currently the best book on software engineering

I really wish every software engineer would read this. The most interesting parts are the level of collaboration between engineers and how much broader their job is than only coding.

Too long & naive

This book is for Google fan boys, who think that Google has it all figured out already. Some of the ideas are reoccurring, some internal tool descriptions are irrelevant unless you work there (like how the code review tool's screens look like), some explanations/suggestions around oss process are unrealistic & naive etc. In many many cases it directly contradicts things like the DORA report etc.

Do yourself a favor and don't buy the book. It's a complete waste of time

Google: Be Evil

This is very much a paean of praise on behalf of and by Google for itself. That is spends so much of the book self-congratulating itself for equity and fairness whilst in reality purging dissenting voices, such as James Damore, at least is gppd for a chuckle.

not useful

This was recommended for interview prep. Nothing in this book would have helped in any of my interviews.

A lot of disclaimers in the beginning, then proceeds to talk about attitude for a long while and practically claim the Google way is the best way for the rest of the book, but requires Google special sauce and internal-only tools.
They repeat "built to scale" a million times and use it as an excuse and reason for almost anything.

the narration is well done.