Software Engineering at Google

Software Engineering at Google

Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright

Legibility Tax

Standardization enables scale but destroys local knowledge.

Related to these policies was a shift in cultural norms surrounding large-scale changes. While it is important for code owners to have a sense of responsibility for their software, they also needed to learn that large-scale changes were an important part of Google’s effort to scale our software engineering practices.