Software Engineering at Google

Chapter 2. How to Work Well on Teams

Written by Brian Fitzpatrick

Edited by Riona MacNamara

Because this chapter is about the cultural and social aspects of software engineering at Google, it makes sense to begin by focusing on the one variable over which you definitely have control: you.

People are inherently imperfect—we like to say that humans are mostly a collection of intermittent bugs. But before you can understand the bugs in your coworkers, you need to understand the bugs in yourself. We’re going to ask you to think about your own reactions, behaviors, and attitudes—and in return, we hope you gain some real insight into how to become a more efficient and successful software engineer who spends less energy dealing with people-related problems and more time writing great code.

The critical idea in this chapter is that software development is a team endeavor. And to succeed on an engineering team—or in any other creative collaboration—you need to reorganize your behaviors around the core principles of humility, respect, and trust.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s begin by observing how software engineers tend to behave in general.

Help Me Hide My Code

For the past 20 years, my colleague Ben¹ and I have spoken at many programming conferences. In 2006, we launched Google’s (now deprecated) open source Project Hosting service, and at first, we used to get lots of questions and requests about the product. But around mid-2008, we began to notice a trend in the sort of ...