Rajya Vardhan Mishra

I am an Engineering Manager working at Google with almost 20 years of experience. If I could sit down with a Jr. Software Engineer, here are 11 good pieces of advice I would tell them that I learned through my experiences…

1// If your app only serves around 10 users, a single server and a basic REST API will do the job. But if you’re handling 10 million requests a day, you need to start thinking about load balancers, autoscaling, and rate limiting.

2// If only one developer is building features, you can skip the ceremonies and just ship and test manually. But if you have 10 developers pushing code daily, it’s time to invest in CI/CD pipelines, multiple testing layers, and feature flags.

3// If a bit of downtime just breaks a single page, adding a banner and moving on is usually enough. But if downtime kills a key business flow, redundancy, health checks, and graceful fallbacks are absolutely necessary.

4// If you’re just consuming APIs, make sure you know how to handle errors like 400s and 500s. If you’re building APIs for others, you need to version them, document everything, test thoroughly, and set up proper monitoring.

5// If your product can tolerate a few seconds of lag, always pick code clarity over squeezing out a little more performance. But if users are waiting on every click, profiling, caching, and edge delivery need to become a part of your daily work.

6// If your data easily fits in RAM, keep things simple and store it in memory using maps. But if your data spans terabytes, you have to start thinking about indexing, partitioning, and optimizing for disk access patterns.

7// If you’re coding alone, poor naming might just annoy you. But in a growing team, bad names become a ticking time bomb for everyone.

8// If you’re only fixing bugs once a week, basic logs and console prints are probably enough. But when you’re running production systems, you need structured logs, tracing, real-time alerts, and dashboards.

9// If you’re up against tight deadlines, write the simplest code that gets things working. But if the code is meant to last, focus on readability, thorough testing, and making it easy to change in the future.

10// If you’re working alone, “it works on my machine” might be good enough. But in a real team, reproducible builds and shared development setups are the bare minimum.

11// If your app is new, move fast and don’t worry too much about cleaning up right away. But once your app is stuck in maintenance hell, you’ll pay the price for every rushed decision you made in the past.

People think software engineering is just about building things.
It’s really about:
– Knowing when not to build
– Being okay with deleting good code
– Balancing tradeoffs without always having all the data

The best engineers don’t just ship fast.
They build systems that are safe to move fast on top of.

4 years ago, I appeared for my Google interviews when I was suffering from COVID-19 & had done barely any Google-specific preparation at all.

3 weeks later, I got the confirmation email with my offer on my birthday. This is my story of joining Google during one of the hardest times of my life.

In March 2020, I got a call from a Google recruiter and that’s where it all started.

I was excited, it was Google, after all.  When they asked if I’d like to interview, I didn’t hesitate.

I told them, “Give me a month to prepare,” thinking I’d use that time to get ready for one of the toughest hiring processes out there.

But life had other plans.

I was in the middle of interviewing with other companies, was serving my notice period and had already cracked an offer from Uber.

I was also suffering from COVID and my mother was affected, too. Honestly, it was one of the toughest periods of my life.

Thirty days later, right on schedule, the recruiter followed up.

But, I had done absolutely nothing to prepare.

Panic set in, but I didn’t want to pass up the chance.

I scheduled the interviews, hoping I could somehow manage.

Getting an Oxygen cylinder for my mother was top priority, and prepping for Google was the last thing on my mind.

When the interview dates approached, I had no Google-specific preparation.

I hadn’t brushed up on their systems, frameworks, or patterns.

What I did have was the foundation I’d built during my preparation for other interviews.

I booked a few mock interviews with ex-Googlers to get some insight and hoped it would be enough.

When the interview dates arrived, I walked in with nothing but instinct and grit.

Each round was challenging, but I leaned on my fundamentals.
–I solved problems.
–I explained my designs.
–I gave it everything I had left.

A few weeks later, on my birthday, I got the call. 
I had cracked the Google offer!!

This experience taught me one thing:

A never-give-up attitude will carry you through when life tests you the most.

Sometimes, the hardest times lead to the greatest wins.

If life is testing you right now, keep going. You’ve got this!

These days, you’ll hear people say: “If you’re earning just 80K a month as a software engineer, you’re living cheap. A good lifestyle starts at 2-3 lakhs per month.”

But life isn’t always what Instagram tells you.
Let me tell you a story about my old colleague, Arjun.

He was a quiet guy. First to reach the office. Last to leave.
Never complained, never asked for favors.

His starting salary was ₹38,000.
And every month, he sent ₹15,000 straight to his father’s account.
No questions asked. That money ran their house.

He stayed in a shared PG. He only got two meals a day. 
So he’d skip lunch half the time. 
Or just have a banana, some biscuits, and tea.
Some days, he’d walk 3 km to the office to save money.
When others would order biryani on Fridays, he’d quietly say, “I’ll eat later.”

He wasn’t stingy.
Because he had barely enough money left for the month.

I know this cause I once talked to him about his family, his journey, and it was the most surprising and humbling thing:

“Mujhe bura nahi lagta, main kama raha hoon. Ghar bhej raha hoon and seekh rha hoon, life chalti rahegi, aage badhte rahenge”

This guy had no entitlement, no shame, and he was one of the most dignified people I had met.

He didn’t need 2 lakhs a month to feel successful.
He just needed to feel useful & to know he was building something worthwhile for his folks at home.

So when people say “80K is cheap,”
I know they’ve never stood in Arjun’s shoes or someone like him.

Because while you have more, it doesn’t make it okay to call others cheap. 
Everyone has their own timeline on things, so what gives us the right to judge?

The struggle of building from the ground up takes more strength than most people will ever understand, and the satisfaction of it is also unmatched.

Let’s judge less, respect more.