Inside Google's Engineering Culture: Part 1

Today, the tech giant Google reaches more people with its products than any other business in the world across all industries, via the likes of Google Search, Android, Chrome, Gmail, and more. It also operates the world’s most-visited website, and the second most-visited one, too: YouTube. Founded in 1998, Google generated the single largest profit ($115B after all costs and taxes) of all companies globally, last year.

Aside from its size, Google is known for its engineering-first culture, and for having a high recruitment bar for software engineers who, in return, get a lot of autonomy and enjoy good terms and conditions. Employees are known as “Googlers,” and new joiners – “Nooglers” – get fun swag when they start. An atmosphere of playful intellectual curiosity is encouraged in the workplace, referred to internally as “Googleyness” – more on which, later. This culture is a major differentiator from other Big Tech workplaces.

But what is it really like to work at Google? What’s the culture like, how are things organized, how do teams get things done – and how different is Google from any other massive tech business, truly?

This article is a “things I wish I’d known about Google before joining as an SWE / engineering manager”. It’s for anyone who wants to work at Google, and is also a way to learn, understand, and perhaps get inspired by approaches that work for one of the world’s leading companies.

This mini-series of articles focusing on Google contains more information about more aspects of its engineering culture than has been published in one place before, I believe. We’ve spent close to 12 months researching it, including having conversations with 25 current and former engineering leaders and software engineers at Google; the majority of whom are at Staff (L6) level or above.

Of course, it’s impossible to capture every detail of a place with more than 60,000 software engineers, and whose product areas (Google’s version of orgs) and teams work in different ways. Google gives a lot of freedom to engineers and teams to decide how they operate, and while we cannot cover all that variety, we aim to provide a practical, helpful overview.

In part 1 of this mini-series, we cover:

1. Overview. Google generates more revenue than Microsoft and Meta, and is the Big Tech giant that likely employs the most software engineers across 25+ engineering offices. The mission statement is to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

2. What makes Google special? Behind the variety of approaches to work is a universal engineering culture for tools and practices. Google has a unique, custom engineering stack, and has built systems differently from competitors since day one, making it a “tech island”. Google has historically been more open than other Big Tech companies about its inner workings. With 120+ active products, it is most similar to Microsoft in the breadth of work it does, and in the opportunities there are for software engineers to work on different things.

3. Levels and roles. There’s a dual-track career ladder between levels L2 and L11, and a Tech Lead Manager (TLM) role as a “third career path”. Google’s leveling process during interviews is the strictest in the industry, and “tech lead” is a role, not a level. Other engineering roles include SRE, EngProd, Research Scientist, DevRel, and UXE. Other roles that interact with engineering include Product Managers, Program Managers, TPMs, designers, and tech writers.

4. Compensation. Google pays at the top of regional markets, and is known for its standout compensation which includes base pay, equity, cash bonus, and sometimes a signing-on bonus. Examples of this top-of-market pay:

   • Mid-level engineer (L4) usually pays in the range of:

     • $250-350K in total compensation in the US

     • Other regions: £125-185K in the UK, €140-180K in Germany, CHF 210-260K in Switzerland, CA$210-280K in Canada, A$200-280K in Australia, zł380-450K in Poland, and ₹65-88 lakh in India

   • Staff software engineer (L6) usually pays in the range of:

     • $550-700K in total compensation in the US

     • Other regions: £270-380K in the UK, €250-330K in Germany, CHF 370-500K in Switzerland, CA$420-650K in Canada, A$350-550K in Australia, zł750-850K in Poland, and ₹1.5-2.2 crore in India

   • We cover entry-level (L3), senior (L5), senior staff (L7) packages, and also Google-specific bonuses like peer bonuses, spot bonuses, and award programmes.

   • Google is one of few companies to offer a financially rewarding career path for engineers which doesn’t push them into management

5. Hiring. Google has a notoriously difficult interview process which is copied by many other tech companies. Data structures and algorithms interviews, system design, “Googleyness”, and leadership interviews are also features of recruitment, and some teams use domain deepdives and takehomes. Final recruitment decisions are made by a Hiring Committee, but that’s still not the end of the process – successful candidates then go through “team matching”.

This article is around twice as long as most deepdives; there are just so many details worth sharing about Google!

For similar deepdives, see Inside Meta’s engineering culture, Inside Amazon’s engineering culture, and other engineering culture deepdives — including that of OpenAI, Stripe and Figma.

Programming note: this week, an episode of The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast will be released tomorrow (Wednesday), and there will be no edition of The Pulse.

1. Overview

Let’s begin with a quick rundown of the numbers that give Google the most users and customers of any business, globally:

• #1 and #2 most-visited websites: Google.com is the most popular website in the world, and YouTube is #2. Google.com gets 85 billion monthly visits – more than the next 9 most-visited websites, combined

• Android: around 4.2 billion users (circa 75% of global smartphone market share)

• Chrome: circa 3.45 billion users (around 65% of global browser market share)

• Gmail: approximately 1.8 billion active users

In 2015 when Google renamed itself “Alphabet”, the motivation was to separate the core web search business that earned the lion’s share of revenue from loss-making, “moonshot” ventures like Waymo, Google DeepMind, Google Fiber, etc. In practice, almost all revenue generated by Alphabet comes from the Google organizational unit, and not much has changed since. This artic