There's a small caveat though. It may have been a clearly good choice to go to Google in early to mid 2000s, but since then there's already an incredible amount of legacy code written supporting business critical functions at Google. This isn't a criticism of Google at all, but it is a limitation on the new things you could do at Google or any other company with legacy systems. Working at Google doesn't free you from the responsibility (not just to yourself, but to the people using your work), as an engineer, to learn on your own what you aren't learning at your workplace.
That being said, I have incredible respect for Google for being a few engineering/science driven Internet companies out there, which respects great hackers and beautiful, quality code. Most Internet companies (including many startups, with few great exceptions) are solving social, rather than scientific or technical problems and treat developers the same way Google treats servers (as a commodity, where the ability to replace them quickly -- and make do if they're unavailable -- is more important than their quality).
Speaking about legacy code, I read somewhere (probably via twitter) that new hires were given Michael Feather's book: "Working Effectively with Legacy Code".
I have a lot respect to companies that acknowledge these kind of issues and try to fix them.
I know there are many companies that just tell the engineers to quit whining/complaining about the current system and keep patching issues (fire and extinguish).
They have me a copy of that book during my orientation at Google, along with a series of other books on the core languages used within Google. Obviously, it's up to every engineer to put that to good use, but the company is making an effort to have people do things the right way.
That's very interesting! I'll have to check that book out (just given some of the open source projects I've dabbled in), anyone else have an opinion on it?
That being said, I have incredible respect for Google for being a few engineering/science driven Internet companies out there, which respects great hackers and beautiful, quality code. Most Internet companies (including many startups, with few great exceptions) are solving social, rather than scientific or technical problems and treat developers the same way Google treats servers (as a commodity, where the ability to replace them quickly -- and make do if they're unavailable -- is more important than their quality).