Second week on the new job

It's been a busy week. Google has a ton of training stuff for Nooglers. A lot of it consists of learning secret stuff that may never be spoken of with the outside world. Fun stuff. But I've been more impressed by the real difference in attitude developers have here.

Every company says "you should write unit tests for all your code". This is the first time I've actually had training on how to do such a thing. And there's tons of infrastructure to make writing these tests easy. Then, every time you want to check in code you have to get it code reviewed. This ensures that all coding standards are followed, and makes sure everything is unit tested. But more importantly it makes everyone feel a group responsibility for the code. It also ensures that everyone in the group knows how well everyone can program. This means the peer review process actually works.

I'm having a great time so far, although my mind is numb everyday from information overload. I suppose that's a good thing. I look forward to actually contributing in the near future.

So I'm a googler

To be more precise, I'm a Noogler, an endearing term that sticks with new Google employees for their first month. I even get a funny Noogler hat to wear to the beer bash this Friday.

So far I must say I'm very impressed. I'm writing this from my new laptop, which is far more capable than the development machine I had before. My linux box at work has one of the biggest screens I've ever seen (So big that you'd be embarrassed to have it expect that everyone else does too, some two). The food was good, but we were herded like sheep today from orientation to orientation and had lunch on the go. I look forward to trying all the cafs.

The overall company feeling is great. Everyone is brilliant, and everyone is new. Seriously, I met one guy who'd been there more than a year. My team is half people under two months, and there's a new guy starting next week. I've been spending the day going through the piles of employee benefits. It's crazy. There's no way you could take advantage of all of them.

Tomorrow I start my engineering-centric training, so that should be better. I'll let everyone know how things are going.

Ciao...