Thread by @Nevkontakte

Ever so often I see another twitter thread or a post somewhere, sharing another terrible story of how terrible it is to work at Google. And then I see people commenting "no way I'm responding to a Google recruiter after this". I have something to say about it. 1/?

While those stories are sad and would not happen in an ideal world, it's unfair to judge the entire company only by negative samples. So in this thread I'm gonna give you a positive one. Be warned, it doesn't read as a thriller or a detective story, but it's worth sharing. 2/?

It's been almost 3 years since I've joined one of Google's SRE teams in Dublin. It's been quite a ride so far, and I'm not quitting just yet :-) 3/?

But before I continue, a disclaimer: whatever I say has nothing to do with official position on the company or anyone else. It is the truth as I perceive it, all biases included. This is also a single sample and doesn't represent the entirety of the company. 4/?

So, I joined the company about a year after completing my master's degree. I had a bunch of software engineering under my belt, but I was not at all convinced I could work for *Google* and not get fired. Also I had a very vague idea what SRE work looks like.

Well, I heard they are the guys (not only them, actually) who get Google back up again if it goes down, but am I up to such a task? I was no superhero last time I checked. Also don't forget the language barrier, my English was not even fluent. So I was worried. 6/?

And then I met the team. Actually I met my manager first. He knew I arrived to the country about a week before the starting date and invited me to an informal lunch a few days before the day. 7/?

He told me about the team, what kind of services they were working on, how the work process looks like, answered all questions I could come up with, explained what was expected of me, and so on. In the end of that day I felt a little better about what future holds for me. 8/?

Then there was ramp up process. The deadline was set as "as long as it takes, which is usually 6 months or so, but whatever", at which point I was to join the regular pager rotation, just like everyone else on the team. I naively decided I'm gonna do it in 4 moths :-) 9/?

At times it felt overwhelming, legitimately so. Google's infrastructure is huge. It makes incredible things possible. It makes some of a simpler things complicated too, but that's a fair price to pay :-) Learning the basics took a while, there is plenty of dark corners still 10/?

To cope with that, I was given an advice: "there's no such a thing as dumb question". One of the more senior teammates was assigned to me my mentor. In simple words, my go-to question person for all things related to my work. There also was my manager. 11/?

So I've been asking, a lot. (It wasn't easy to overcome "I can figure this out" syndrome, tho). It wasn't even a single time when I'd gotten a condescending or dismissive response. Everyone was more than willing to help and explain and show tricks they have up their sleeves. 12/?

Oh, before I forget: I relocated from Russia to Ireland in order to join Google. The company made this almost as easy as they possibly could. Paperwork, moving costs, temporary accommodation and helping to find permanent one. Spared me a lot of headache. 13/?

Back to me and my ramp-up. Eventually I reached to stage of going oncall. I was stressed again (-: I knew a bunch about how different parts but could I fix it if it breaks? Our service wasn't directly user-facing, but was still in the revenue path. 14/?

Btw, kudos to YouTube SRE and many other folks who worked around the clock last night to bring YT up. You rock. (Digressing even further, cat videos is the best thing that has happened to Internet so far). 15/?

Back to the subject. Again, the team was more than helpful. For the first few shifts I always had someone sanding by to help (or guide) me, if I get stuck. Then for a while I was getting only weekdays shifts, so that there would be someone around just in case. 16/?

I've been doing fine, in fact. I did use some help, but it wasn't as bad as I feared. When I was to be oncall over the weekend, I was a bit worried nevertheless, so one of the colleagues offered to stay within reach. If anything went bad, I'd page them and debug together. 17/?

Why am I saying all this? Well, to highlight how supportive people are around here. My teammates, my manager. It's not even unique. In any other SRE team I'm familiar with. Jerks happen, but they tend not to stick around for too long. 18/?

While at it, let's talk more about oncall. We have a 24/7 oncall coverage, split between us (Dublin) and our sister team in Pittsburgh, US. At any given time there's one person oncall, and if anything breaks it's up to them to fix it. 19/?

In most cases that's sufficient, but sometimes hell does break loose. Sometimes every fucking thing breaks, all at once. After a while your brain starts melting. And you know what? All you need is to post "guys, can someone help be out?" in IRC to get extra hands on it. 20/?

Or often you don't have to do even that, our teammates will see you're having a busy shift and offer help preemptively. They don't have to. They can just keep coding and nobody would blame them. But again, there are a lot of good people, who are very willing to help. 20/?

Which makes it orders of magnitude easier to deal with any kind of outage, because *you are never alone* 21/?

This isn't SRE-specific too. Our dev teams (whose product we are oncall for) are also very much willing to help, be that a production issue or some project work, code/design reviews or whatever. Again, often they don't have to, but they do. Because people are pretty cool. 22/?

Another cool-story. At one point a new person joined out team, at our manager explained in 1:1s that this new guy is going to replace him as a manager of our team, assuming all things go well. And in several moths (6? 8? don't remember) he did become our manager. 23/?

He was literally the newest member on our team, he had the shortest tenure and we were now reporting to him. Was I pissed? Was anyone else pissed? 24/?

Nope. Everyone was very much on board with this. Why not? Because he was (and still is) actually a pretty good manager, both technical and good at dealing with people. And if he is better at managing people then everybody else, why not let him? 25/?

Also climbing the management ladder is not the only was to get promoted. You can grow as a technical specialist just fine, even remaining an "individual contributor". So no one's ambitions were hurt. 26/?.

Which brings us to another touch subject: promotions at Google. Oh boy, people will always hate "the promo process", no matter how it looks like. A few months ago there was a post by a former googler bashing promotion process pretty hard. 27/?

Ironically, not so long before the post was published, the promo process was changed to address a lot of pain points the post was talking about. People are still annoyed not a bit less, just complaining about different things. 28/?

If I were to guess, people would be unhappy about any promo process, just because people like to be rewarded, but don't like to be judged. In reality, however, you are always judged before you are rewarded. 29/?

And yes, promo process at Google may seem complicated, time-consuming and very abstract. But it is by design, because it aims to be a fair and unbiased as humanly possible. Hint: people are inherently biased, so it's hard. 30/?

On a plus side, if you manager doesn't quite like you you can still get promoted. But you gotta put some effort into making this happen. Seems fair to me. 31/?

For the record: I did go through this process. Afterwards I sworn to never do this ever again. But as frustration wore off, I realized that it wasn't as bad as it seemed. 32/?

What else?.. Right. Projects. Building great things. Opportunities do vary by team. It looks pretty good for SRE teams, though: it most teams it's not that difficult find something big and useful to work on. Because small products don't get SRE teams :-P 33/?

It is important to be able to justify your work, before you get a green light. But digging up some numbers to support your cause is usually not that hard if you are actually solving a practical problem. Even getting a buy-in from senior management is not that bad. 34/?

Again, the company pays you money, so it's fair for it to ask an evidence that those money will be well spent. And while data-driven culture has its own pitfalls, if you have the numbers, you can't be easily dismissed. 35/?

At a risk of digressing: any mature engineer *must* know what business value their work brings if they want to take initiative. For better or worse, it's capitalism and any commercial company cares about money *a lot*. 36/?

Back to the good parts, to recap: people at Google are generally nice and kind. Interesting and impactful work? Plenty of it if you look for it. And overall culture is strongly focused at being objective. It is something hard, but is worth the effort. 37/?

Another bright part of my work is, somewhat surprisingly, interns. Google is working with a lot of universities across the globe to offer internships to students. This is pretty great, for students, for teams and for the company itself. 38/?

This is, obviously, not a charity: Google wants these students to graduate and join the company as full-time employees, which are already familiar with internal stack. 39/?

For students it's pretty great too: you gain some real-world experience, and if all works well a nice job offer by the time you finish your degree. Plus a nice entry to your CV to get some competing offers going ;-) 40/?

And for "hosting" teams it is a good thing too: people say that the best way to understand something is to try to explain it, right? Well, hosting interns turns out to be a great way to learn about software engineering! 41/?

I myself was able to formalize a lot of "best practices" I was using just by my gut feeling, while trying to explain them to our interns. Boy, I learned a lot (-: Also it feels very rewarding to see how they learn and grow over a few months.

If you like explaining things, this is one of the best things you could do short of becoming a professor. At least as from my point of view. 43/?

Besides, intern projects are a great way to build a high-risk project or prototype something, which you would never get regular headcount for. 44/?

Anyways, this thread went on long enough, time to wrap up. Google is a nice place to work. Of course bad things happen sometimes. But they happen surprisingly rarely for a company with tens of thousands employees all over the world. 45/?

Yes, it's not all unicorns and fairies, it does have a bunch of bureaucracy, legacy systems and office politics, but much less than you might thing by reading the news. You can be a cog (a happy one!) or make an impact, if that's your ambition. 46/?

Google is not a perfect company, but it's a good one. 47/47.