TL;DR
A long-form reflection distills 21 lessons from roughly 14 years working at Google, emphasizing that thriving engineers manage people, ambiguity, and alignment as much as code. The piece stresses user-focused problem solving, shipping early, making work legible, and balancing innovation with operational costs.
What happened
The author published a reflective essay drawing on about 14 years at Google and organized the piece as 21 practical lessons for engineers. Rather than focusing on specific technologies, the lessons center on recurring patterns: prioritize deep understanding of user problems, favor getting working prototypes in front of users, and trade cleverness for clarity so work is maintainable by others. The post highlights soft-but-operational skills such as making your impact visible, aligning teams to avoid slowdowns, and treating compatibility and deprecation as product work. It warns that novelty carries ongoing operational costs, abstractions can postpone failures to on-call moments, and invisible "glue work" is essential but career-risky if left unmade visible. The author also recommends writing and teaching as tools for clarifying thought, and cautions that winning debates without alignment accumulates silent resistance.
Why it matters
- Engineers' long-term impact depends on interpersonal, organizational, and product thinking as much as technical skill.
- Shipping early and learning from users reduces wasted effort compared with lengthy design-only debates.
- Choosing new technologies has ongoing operational and hiring costs that can exceed short-term benefits.
- Making non-code work visible is necessary both for product reliability and for career recognition.
Key facts
- The essay lists 21 lessons drawn from roughly 14 years of experience at Google.
- Top recurring themes: user obsession, bias toward action, clarity over cleverness, and alignment.
- The author advises spending time with support tickets and direct user observation to understand problems.
- Shipping an imperfect prototype accelerates learning and beats prolonged architecture debates.
- Clarity in code and communication is framed as an operational risk reduction, not stylistic preference.
- Novel or nonstandard technology choices should be limited due to maintenance, hiring, and outage costs.
- Abstractions move complexity to moments when they fail — engineers should understand lower levels of their stack.
- Glue work like documentation and onboarding is vital but can be invisible; it should be made legible and bounded.
What to watch next
- Using AI to accelerate prototyping and get early feedback (the author notes AI can help here).
- How teams handle API deprecations and migration tooling; the essay treats deprecation as product work.
- Efforts to make glue work visible and timeboxed so it doesn't stall technical careers.
Quick glossary
- MVP: Minimum viable product — the smallest version of a product that can be shipped to get real user feedback.
- Abstraction: A layer that hides lower-level implementation details, which can simplify development but may conceal failure modes.
- API deprecation: The planned process of retiring an API, typically requiring migration paths, tooling, and transition time for users.
- Glue work: Non-feature tasks such as documentation, onboarding, coordination, and process improvements that enable other teams to work effectively.
- User obsession: A practice of deeply understanding user needs through support, observation, and repeated questioning to inform solutions.
Reader FAQ
Who wrote the lessons and where were they published?
not confirmed in the source
Are the lessons about specific technologies?
No — the piece explicitly avoids technology-specific guidance and focuses on persistent patterns and behaviors.
Does the author recommend using AI?
The author suggests AI can help with rapid prototyping and getting early feedback, but does not present it as a universal solution.
Will deleting code help my project?
The essay argues deleting or avoiding unnecessary code often improves systems more than adding new code, though concrete effects depend on context.
21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google JANUARY 3, 2026 When I joined Google ~14 years ago, I thought the job was about writing great code. I was partly right….
Sources
- Lessons from 14 Years at Google
- 21 Lessons from 14 Years at Google – Elevate | Addy Osmani
- Effective Software Engineers: my free new Google video …
- 21 Lessons from 14 Years at Google 👇🏻 read this and this …
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