Google Code Quality

Intuit
lWVO05

Go to company page Intuit

lWVO05
Dec 18, 2019 11 Comments

I've seen quite a few posts claiming that Google's code quality standards are a fair bit higher than most companies including other members of FAANG.

Stringent code reviews are often cited as a contributing factor.

What else enables Google to hit this quality bar?

How does Google incentivize engineers to spend so much time reviewing code? Or addressing tech debt / refactoring / rewriting when such hygiene tasks may jeapordize meeting deadlines?

How does Google maintain developer velocity / productivity while keeping such a high quality bar?

Besides code reviews, what other metics does Google use to measure the quality of a codebase?

Appreciate the insight.

TC: 220k

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TOP 11 Comments
  • Google
    dinoball

    Go to company page Google

    dinoball
    I should have also mentioned that there is such a thing as “readability reviewers” on almost every code change you submit. Readability is just one more set of long guidelines to follow to make sure the code is human readable.
    Dec 18, 2019 2
  • Amazon / Eng
    weeeeeeee

    Go to company page Amazon Eng

    BIO
    AWS
    weeeeeeee
    When I was in search adtech, that certainly wasn’t the case. Where did you hear this from?
    Dec 18, 2019 2
    • T-Mobile
      heckoworld

      Go to company page T-Mobile

      BIO
      looking for new opportunities...
      heckoworld
      Several recent previous posts asked about code quality at Google with Google employees responding their code reviews were very detailed. The most detailed they'd ever seen.
      Dec 18, 2019
    • Google / Eng
      SergeyBlin

      Go to company page Google Eng

      SergeyBlin
      Highly depends on the team. There's plenty of rubber stamp reviewers.
      Dec 18, 2019
  • Google
    dinoball

    Go to company page Google

    dinoball
    Google code is better “formatted”. You have to run the fornatting tool before you can check in the code.

    Now there’s a lot of google code that is not of any reasonable quality. Google code is much harder to understand in general because everyone is trying to be so smart and demonstrate “difficulty” for all the wrong reasons.
    Dec 18, 2019 3
    • Reliable Software / Eng
      Sugoidesu

      Reliable Software Eng

      Sugoidesu
      Formatted? Don't all companies do this? Most of the modern ides have formatter already. Not to mention do PRs get approved if code is not formatted properly? Also most of the companies should have precommit hooks to auto format in case the employee forgets to do that anyway. So what makes Google formatter better? Just curious
      Dec 18, 2019
    • Google
      dinoball

      Go to company page Google

      dinoball
      > Don’t all companies do this?
      In my experience, Google is the only company that does this.

      > what makes Google formatter better?
      The coding style guidelines are a lot stricter (more anal and much longer guidelines) than any formatter you can find out there (or they might have open sourced the google formatter, I probably would call it Google Anal).

      In short, formatted code means little. If the code sucks, then it sucks no matter how much you format it.
      Dec 18, 2019
  • Cisco
    temo

    Go to company page Cisco

    temo
    May be the Hiring Committee bar?
    Dec 18, 2019 0