codesmell.org

if you´re interested in google (or even thinking about working there ), this looks like a must-read.

The heart of Google is code and all code there is peer reviewed TO DEATH. The result is absolutely the cleanest code in the digital world, forced into that condition by what can be a torturous process of line-by-comment-by punctuation mark analysis sometimes over-driven by people who take their work WAY too seriously. You know the type. Peer review wars have apparently been known to break out at Google, though rarely. Usually the pedants are accommodated and, in fact, they for the most part win. The code is clean as a result, but the process is s-l-o-w, or so I’ve been told.

And the code had better be clean, because at Google developers outnumber testers by 50-to-1.

But peer review at Google goes way beyond looking at the code. Hiring requires peer review. Promotion requires peer review. Presumably even firing requires peer review, though I didn’t have anyone actually tell me that. All the technical workers at Google are involved in peer review activities a LOT of the time — up to 20 percent, in fact.

Which brings us to the vaunted 20 percent time Google engineers are supposed to get to work on anything they like. Most of them apparently use that time for corporate housekeeping — for doing all that peer reviewing. It makes sense: if you want to appear productive in your main job yet are still required to do all this work that would normally be handled by managers, when else can you do it but during time you don’t have to account for?

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