Advice for New Googlers

[rambleraptor]

Hey! Any advice for somebody starting at Google soon?

[nfischer]

And if you have any advice for a noogler who recently started on chromium, that would be awesome too 😁 👍

[notwaldorf]

Oops, I completely missed this! Welcome, welcome!

I think I'd have the same advice for non-googlers too, though Google tends to be a bigger, more intimidating place than most, so, in no order:

• Be kind. To your coworkers, to your reviewers, to your barista, to the random people that send you code reviews. Negative energies tend to propagate like dominos, and before you know it, everyone around you is in a grumpy mood because one of their reviewers snapped at them.
• Ask questions. Everyone says this, and it sounds vacuous, but it's true. You're going to be tempted to think "So-and-so is so much smarter than me and this is a dumb question so I shouldn't ask it", but you should ask it anyway, even if it is. First of all, nobody is too busy to answer a question. Second of all, everybody likes answering a question they know the answer to. Third of all, this will pay off in the long run because maybe next time someone will ask you a question and they'll be spared.
• Don't wait for interesting work. This is a bit of a tricky one, because you're probably going to be assigned a bunch of work, and you're going to feel overwhelmed about it at first. But as you're doing whatever task you're doing, you might spot something that's really interesting to you that you might want to work a little on. Do that! While I was working on a completely unrelated area of Chrome, I tried fixing emoji font rendering (without knowing anything about fonts or emoji). It turns out I really cared about emoji, and now that's something I know a lot about.
• Know how to pick your code reviewers. This is maybe the most interesting to @nfischer, who's going to have a billion Chromium reviewers to pick from, but not all reviewers are the same. My favourite Chrome reviewers are overly picky -- this doesn't come from a bad place, they just want you to learn the most you can, and to write the best code you can. Everything I know about Chrome I've learnt from my code reviewers, so I tend to pick the ones who've been along the most. Maybe at first you want to cast a wide net, and pick different reviewers for every CL (or PR or whatever you call commits on your team), and see which ones jam with you the most.

This can go on for ever. Try to find a person you respect in your team/area/company, figure out what they do that you respect, and try to get inspired by that. Maybe ask them for coffee and ask them about career tips, since if they've been around for a while, they might have some advice.

Oh, and have fun. If you don't have fun, you won't like your work, and if you don't like your work, well, that'll be kinda shitty. And don't eat all the snacks at once.

[nfischer]

@notwaldorf Thanks for the tips! I'll be sure to take the code review advice to heart 😄

[rambleraptor]

I never responded to this! Thanks a lot for the advice. It's been really helpful. Especially the part about code reviews :)