A day in the life of a Google Software Engineer | Work-from-home Edition

[Music] due to the coronavirus pandemic all hundred thousand google employees are now working from home this changes life a little bit [Music] the co-worker i work with the most is chris he's in london so that means that from a time zone point of view he is finishing his day just as i'm starting so the first thing i do when i get in is i check the pull requests he's made overnight and he's made three of them so let's take a look [Music] this pull request from chris is an example of what not to do if you have a look here you'll see that he's added 5 000 lines and deleted all 70. uh 5 000 lines is a lot of stuff to review so in this case it was necessary but in general when you do work you should do it in smaller chunks so that it can be reviewed more easily [Music] i think it's supposed to be at return not at returns let me check the documentation for that [Music] this is an example of an utterly trivial issue in a code review the use of return versus returns as it turns out they both work the same way but our code base has standardized on the word return having ruthless consistency across a code base allows one to search for problems much more easily it also allows one to read the code faster [Music] here's another issue the copyright statement he started this file a couple of years ago but since then google is no longer an incorporated company it's now an llc and also our url has changed so i need to film to update that the best thing about being a software engineer is that no two days are the same one day i might be fixing bugs the next i might be dealing with a security incident and another day i might be doing taxidermy yes that was a real thing this is the application that i'm working on it's called code city and it's a comic book environment where you can browse around looking at things examining things and so on the problem is if something happens to the connection now we're disconnected but there's no indication that we're disconnected so if i were to issue a command nothing happens so what we wanted to do is to alert us that hey there's a problem [Music] one of the secrets for handling a big code base is to have a big monitor the more code one can see on screen the less one has to keep track of and now disconnect there we go now we have a visual indication that something very badly wrong with your network and you no longer hang the user [Music] one of the responsibilities of every google engineer is to conduct interviews for potential new hires every week i talk to a candidate ask them questions about the sort of work they've done in the past what they want to do and try to assess their technical skills about two percent of applicants end up getting a job at google with the day's work complete and my code sent off to chris for code review it's time to be a dad [Music] and once she's in bed it's time for more software engineering i've got a bunch of open source projects on github that i maintain for fun [Music]

Channel: Sierra Nguyen

Views: 3,747,810

Rating: 4.8775926 out of 5

Keywords: day in the life of a software engineer, day in the life, a day in the life of a software engineer, Google, software engineer day in life, software engineering, software developer, work from home

Id: a0glBQXOcl4

Length: 5min 17sec (317 seconds)

Published: Thu May 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/bigorangemachine]

This is why you use eslint.

This dude wasted 5 minutes looking up returns....

I never read the licenses!

[u/toosecsy]

You know that number with a 9 and a 6 but not in that order

[u/tsojtsojtsoj]

lol