I hear a lot about google tools. But for me it’s hard to imagine a really good internal set of tools that doesn’t lack behind the industry in usability. What I mean is if you start a new pet project or at a smaller new company do you want to have the same tolling there or you are glad that you can be using things like git, IntelliJ, Circle on your laptop / public account ? And I know it’s going to be hard but would be really great to separate familiarity vs quality. Example: some Googlers introduce Bazel at smaller startups. That’s a clear sign of familiarity bias , it might be a good as part of the internal google ecosystem but for a small company detached from that ecosystem it creates a truly horrendous experience. The company has clearly no real chances of supporting or levering the tool and at the same time without a bigger ecosystem it can’t compete with mainstream build systems #engineering
“Introducing Bazel at a startup is bad” well you’re clearly full of it. What should they be using? Make?!
Well for C++ maybe it’s ok, can’t tell. I saw Java built with bazel
Google has >100k employees, if an internal tool sucks many engineers would happily add it to their OKRs
where is the 100k engineer number coming from? i thought it would be waaay less
Oops I should say >100k employees. Not sure the percentage of eng. Edited
For backend definitely. Frontend felt dated on my team
Yeah, closure compiler and angular are worse compared to Typescript/React. Dart is kind of an ongoing failure, but Flutter could be cool.
jsunit was also around way too long
Wait they aren’t using IntelliJ? They built their own in-house ides/editors?
Curious — How much 3rd party software does Google use? Things like Jira, Datadog, etc.
Google issue tracker, not jira. intelliJ is in wide use, used to be eclipse. there are internal IDEs as well though
the rpc tracing tool and the code browser steve yegge worked on is great. I miss that quite a bit. technically Grok is open source but not sure it's used much. I'm still learning about external tooling options
do ppl actually use dapper still?
I saw dapper but didn't use it personally
Twitter uses open source and every one of them sucks..
really? which ones and how so?
Yes but they were built in house and made open source which hardly anyone else uses it contributes to. Eng tweep here
Phew. 20 YOE and I can honestly say that the dev UX at google is my least favorite so far. I blame most of this on Boq/Wiz and poor documentation, and the fact that I'm using enterprise Java for the first time. The build times and error logging are painful. Code search, on the other hand, is *mwah*.
I joined as a new grad so it's good to hear I'm not the only one who felt this. definitely agree on wiz. boq is nice if you can get hotswap working reliably but debugging can be painful if you encounter something undocumented and have to dig behind the abstractions into AF internals, etc. YAQS is pretty helpful though
Can you talk more about the code search? What’s so great about it? How does it compare to things like Sourcegraph?
Google has a very bad bias against NIH. Not Invented Here. Sometimes it even goes with internal tools and teams. This Bias is stupid and driven by PDD Perf Driven Development
Ok, having used Google’s internal tools, and moved on to Amazon, I recognize the amount of caring and investment went into home grown tools. When I was in Google, it felt chaotic, disorganized, and that there were too many tools. Now I realize just how useful they were and miss them often.
what do you miss. amazon ain't too shabby with tools imo
Noogler here, Google internal tools are far superior than anything I have seen in my 6yoe
What language are we talking about ?
Honeymoon phase bias?