Platform Engineering at Google

Chapter 3. Education and Platform Engineering

By Titus Winters

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 19th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

If it’s accidentally complex, simplify. If it’s inherently complex, educate.

Titus Winters

In an industry that defines itself by constant change and rapid innovation, continuous learning and growth is essential - not only for individuals, but for the organization as a whole. Countless studies and thinkpieces have highlighted the role of culture in technical success, and the consistent themes in descriptions of that culture are learning and growth. For engineering leaders, there are critical questions to be addressed: are you fostering that culture intentionally? And are you incentivizing your platform owners to educate the rest of the organization?

These are too critical to leave to chance, and the academic community cannot do the work for us.

A Culture of Learning

By this point it should be unsurprising, perhaps cliche, to highlight the ways that culture is essential to organizational performance in tech. After all, when ...