How to elevate engineering culture at large corporations?

Who is Steve Yegge referring to as the single seed engineer "singlehandedly responsible for the amazing quality of Google's engineering culture"?

• From http://steve-yegge.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html: I've been debating whether to say this, since it'll smack vaguely of obsequiousness, but I've realized that one of the Google seed engineers (exactly one) is almost singlehandedly responsible for the amazing quality of Google's engineering culture. And I mean both in the sense of having established it, and also in the sense of keeping the wheel spinning. I won't name the person, and for the record he almost certainly loathes me, for reasons that are my own damn fault. But I'd hire him in a heartbeat: more evidence, I think, that the Done, and Gets Things Smart folks aren't necessarily your friends. They're just people you're lucky enough to have worked with. At first it's entirely non-obvious who's responsible for Google's culture of engineering discipline: the design docs, audited code reviews, early design reviews, readability reviews, resisting introduction of new languages, unit testing and code coverage, profiling and performance testing, etc. You know. The whole gamut of processes and tools that quality engineering organizations use to ensure that code is open, readable, documented, and generally non-shoddy work. But if you keep an eye on the emails that go out to Google's engineering staff, over time a pattern emerges: there's one superheroic dude who's keeping us all in line.

• Answer:

  I might be wrong, but when I was an intern there over 2006-2007, I remember sending a lot of emails and being strict about the codebase. It also makes sense because he was Google's first employee and engineer and remained an individual contributor throughout his 13 years at Google. Also corroborating this are the following snippets: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/09/business/la-fi-tn-google-first-employee-craig-silverstein-leaves-for-education-startup-20120209 Later, Silverstein served as Google's http://news.cnet.com/2008-1024_3-5208228.html. Recently he was mentoring younger Google employees, AllThingsD said. "Silverstein worked side by side with the founders to establish Google's distinct culture and wrote his fair share of the nascent search engine's base code," the http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_16291970 reported in 2010. "As Google's first employee, his net worth has been estimated somewhere north of $800 million." Craig Silverstein was important, also.  As the first engineer, he created much of the Engineering culture, and in his later years, he led the master of all grouplets, the Inter-Group. In his later years at Google, Craig as director of technology led a lot of intergrouplets activities. In many way, intergrouplets was what made Google Engineering different from other large engineering organizations. It broke a lot of silos, seeking to create cross-functional teams within Google engineering that took on tasks that were traditionally left to entire departments or were the purview of managers. One example was the hiring grouplet, which seeked to improve the hiring process. Mike Bland writes about a couple of other grouplets here: http://mike-bland.com/2011/09/20/grouplets.html Craig also tried very hard to make Google feel like a small company, even taking on code reviews from new engineers (like me when I was working on gtags: http://code.google.com/p/google-gtags/). However, lots of old-timer Googlers were great about this so it wasn't just Craig. And points out in the comments (thanks!) that in Steve Yegge's original blog post, there's this detail: "I'm guessing that Google's founders worked with this person in school, enough to recognize his valuable talents."  Craig Silverstein was a fellow PhD student at the Stanford Computer Science Department. This would rule out other candidates such as the legendary Jeff Dean, who has also made innumerable contributions to Google's code and culture but joined Google by another path besides Stanford. See