Software engineering at Google & CS education with Titus Winters

29.10.2026 · 1 Std. 40 Min.

Shownotes

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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.

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

07:01 Getting hired by Google

09:48 Finding his niche at Google

14:32 Why Google made testing mandatory

17:45 Why new engineers fear making mistakes

20:40 Abseil: C++ foundations at Google

23:09 Google’s massive C++ refactoring

30:48 AI for rewrites

39:07 Software Engineering at Google: the book

43:10 Google’s readability reviews

47:18 Why teams still matter