[esc_colon_q]

It's fairly normal for a big company these days: extremely slow pace, red tape all over the place, your level matters more than your skill. It's an engineering-led culture so there's a lot of focus on code nitpicking and purity (arguments over whether mocks are evil, etc).

Great place to work if you're high level (5+) and land on a good team with a good manager. Mind numbingly boring if not.

[watermelon59]

By 5+, do you mean over 5 years of experience? Or is that a reference to the internal leveling structure?

[wikibob]

https://levels.fyi

[lupire]

There's no argument over it Mocks are evil.

[esc_colon_q]

Evil enough that new mocks should be banned by fiat and enforced by code that requires rarely granted permission to override against projects that are 5 years old and already have hundreds of them in place and do not have architectures that support better ways of testing?

It might be a nice thing to avoid them, but you're always working with legacy code, and I've literally had "I need to add a button to accept new permissions" blow up into "I need to refactor our entire class structure across 200 files because I'm not allowed to add a new test that follows our old patterns nor commit this code without coverage, and oh yeah, nobody wants to review that CL in one go so I have to figure out how to break it into 20 bite sized changes. There goes my quarter...". That's just dumb, and that type of dumb is very fashionable at Google.

[decentusername]

This is a vast oversimplification of mocks. Mocks themselves aren't evil, they just enable subpar programming. I'd much rather spend 2 minutes making a functional test with a mock than 2 days rewriting a bunch of core functionality in the name of code purity.

[lallysingh]

This is an excellent answer