• WorkOS — The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS.
• Sonar — Trust your developers – verify your AI-generated code. In today’s e

The Pragmatic Engineer

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2024-11-06 18:30:03

• WorkOS — The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. • Sonar — Trust your developers – verify your AI-generated code.

In today’s episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined by Irina Stanescu, a seasoned engineer with over 14 years in software engineering and engineering leadership roles at tech companies like Google and Uber. Now an engineering leadership coach, Irina helps tech professionals build impactful careers, teaches a course on influence, and shares insights through her newsletter, The Caring Techie. In our conversation today, Irina shares her journey of rising through the ranks at Google and Uber. We dive into the following topics:

1. Google is different in its tooling and processes than most tech companies. While it’s common enough to hear from current and former Googlers just how many custom internal systems Google has, Irina shared several of these, which perhaps made it more specific. She mentioned ones like Borg (deployments), Critique (code reviews) and Memgen (meme generator). There’s often no direct mapping of these tools at other companies.

Google also has processes around code quality that few, if any companies put in place. The concept of a “readability review” code reviewer is one of these. It shows just how much Google values clean and easy-to-understand code, to the point that they created a pretty heavyweight process to ensure code readability remains a top priority.