First impressions

Today I found out a little more about what I'm going to be doing.

It seems that the SET (Software Engineering in Test) group of which I was to be a member appears to have merged with other bits to become the "Engineering Productivity and Test" group, the mandate of which seems amazingly broad: to make it easier for the developers to make good products. This includes not just the writing of tools to improve their productivity and ensuring that the build and test mechanisms are working well and quickly, but even the creating and analysing of metrics to provide information to better focus their efforts, or even improve their practices. I wonder whether it extends to making them tea? ;)

Whilst the above is the group of which I'm notionally a member, those people appear primarily to get assigned to work with particular product teams - I'm working with the AdSense team.

I'm not sure which if any of the things we discussed are safely repeatable, so for the moment I'll err on the side of caution. Google are understandably keen on avoiding leaks about new products and features, but I don't know to what degree that also applies to the internal processes and support projects. They seem to be pretty sane about such things, though.

What interested me most about today was the apparently extremely high level of autonomy in the engineers - whilst authority in a conventional sense probably exists at Google, it certainly wasn't very evident. If you feel that something's a good idea, you do it; or at least that's the impression I got today. However the system works, though, it clearly works.