I don't really want to give the impression that it's this totally intimidating atmosphere all the time, because it does fade with time, and most engineers learn to ask questions abundantly, and most engineers are also really great at answering questions. One of the most commonly cited perks of being at Google is the ability to ask anything of anyone. Have a question about HTML 5? Shoot hixie an e-mail. Digging into the internals of Python? Guido works there, as do a number of other core Pythonistas. Building a Go app? Rob Pike can answer.

That said, it is intimidating starting as a Noogler, largely because of the huge volume of proprietary material you need to learn. There's one true way to store structured data, and while it's open-sourced (Protobufs), you've probably never used it. There's a unified JavaScript library (Closure), but it wasn't open-sourced until recently. There're logging, and log-processing, and monitoring, and RPC, and cluster management systems to learn. There're a bunch of storage options, some of which you may've read about in public but never used (BigTable), some of which will be completely new to you.

The scale of problems that Google tackles is also bigger than most people are accustomed to. In a lot of the industry, a few-dozen node cluster is fairly large. At Google, thousands of machines are routine. Big-O notation can be ignored at a lot of shops, but at Google-scale, anything that runs in greater than O(N log N) will usually take centuries. Most frontend web devs never worry about latency; at Google, we care very much. A/B testing has recently made a lot of headlines and had some neat libraries developed for it, but its centrally ingrained in Google's feature development processes.

When you first start out - particularly if you're used to always having the answers, as many Google engineers were - that can be intimidating. There's suddenly so much you don't know, and yet you know (through Google's public reputation) that software obviously gets written there. Once in a while, it's even good software.

For your first few weeks, you probably won't even know what questions to ask, because there's such a volume of knowledge out there. Oftentimes, somebody's already solved your problem, but you don't know about it because it might never occur to you that someone's already solved it. There're also things that Google pays attention to that many other shops don't - in many other employers, you'll never have to deal with internationalization, or handling Chinese characters, or right-to-left languages, or XSS, or managing HTTP resources when you have a large fleet of potentially-out-of-sync webservers. When I started doing code reviews for the websearch webserver, the tech lead said, "We don't expect you to know everything, but we expect that by now you've learned enough to know when you need to ask someone."