Software engineering at Google & CS education with Titus Winters

Brought to You By:• turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable• Linear – the product development system for teams and agents• WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.—An engineer who helped create today’s software engineering curriculum now says to burn down almost all of it. What’s the cause of this contradiction? We find out from the lead author of Software Engineering at Google.Titus Winters spent more than a decade at Google, where he led its readability program and built Abseil, Google’s open-sourced foundational C++ libraries. He is currently a Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe, where he focuses on developer experience and productivity.In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Titus and I discuss how his team tackled a massive refactoring project across Google's 250-million-line C++ codebase, why Google made testing mandatory, and his work on updating the ACM/IEEE undergraduate computer science curriculum guidelines.We also explore why traditional productivity metrics miss some of AI’s biggest benefits, what needs to change in CS education, and how new engineers can stand out.Timestamps00:00 Intro07:01 Getting hired by Google09:48 Finding his niche at Google14:32 Why Google made testing mandatory17:45 Why new engineers fear making mistakes20:40 Abseil: C++ foundations at Google23:09 Google’s massive C++ refactoring30:48 AI for rewrites39:07 Software Engineering at Google: the book43:10 Google’s readability reviews47:18 Why teams still matter52:41 Psychological safety58:17 Layoffs and culture1:02:11 Measuring developer productivity1:11:17 Rethinking CS education1:22:56 What new grads should learn1:32:08 Titus’s ideal software engineering curriculum1:36:27 Advice for breaking into tech1:38:35 Book recommendation—The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:• The state of the tech industry in 2026• Inside Google's Engineering Culture• Slow down to speed up when working with AI agents• Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey• How tech companies measure the impact of AI on software development• What is happening with code reviews?• When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?• Developer productivity with Dr. Nicole Forsgren (creator of DORA, co-creator of SPACE) • Measuring the impact of AI on software engineering – with Laura Tacho—Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com. Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe