Episode · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2025-10-15
Books mentioned on Google’s engineering culture
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Gergely Orosz discussed Site Reliability Engineering by Betsy Beyer and others, and criticized Measure what matters by John Doerr. Elin Nilsson discussed Software Engineering at Google by Titus Winters and others.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Site Reliability Engineering
Discussed“So there are uh in the SRV book which was published in I want to say 2015 2016 which is available online. You can read it online.”
Where to get it
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Software Engineering at Google
Software Engineering at Google by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum Wright documents the engineering practices, cultural values, and scaling strategies that sustain Google's massive codebases.
Discussed“there's also an SV book um software engineering at Google the office yeah I have I have it here on my desk software engineering at Google it's also it's available for free online”
Where to get it
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Measure what matters
Measure What Matters by John Doerr is a prominent business and management book that popularizes the objectives and key results framework.
Critiqued“the book Measure What Matters was published in 2018 and from there on it's really blown up and I think everyone's like using OKRs cuz it like there's this narrative that OKRs make Google successful.”
Where to get it
Other mentions in this episode (1) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
“And there's actually like we've mentioned the sur book there's also an SV book um software engineering at Google the office yeah I have I have it here on my desk software engineering at Google”