Software engineering at Google & CS education with Titus Winters

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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
52:41 Psychological safety
58:17 Layoffs and culture
1:02:11 Measuring developer productivity
1:11:17 Rethinking CS education
1:22:56 What new grads should learn
1:32:08 Titus’s ideal software engineering curriculum
1:36:27 Advice for breaking into tech
1:38:35 Book recommendation
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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
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