Working at Google - the first 6 months
dondodge.typepad.com
dondodge.typepad.com
Ok, I can definitely see that. On the other hand... if I weren't home for dinner, my daughter would wonder where 'dada' was.
Read a different way "Last night there were at least 400 people eating dinner at 8:00PM" means that there were at least 400 people who either don't have families or for whatever reason felt it was better to stay at the office than to be at home w/ their families. The novelty of eating in a company cafeteria wears off, the long-term grind of working for a company where there is pressure to put the company ahead of your personal life does not.
Welcome to Silicon Valley.
I'm not averse to risk but I am skeptical that everyone working late at Google is doing so because they're having so much fun as "rock star" engineers that they can't wait to get back to work.
But I agree, they shouldn't be criticized for being dedicated to their job. But I do think posts, like Don's, seem to implicitly criticize those people who aren't at the cafeteria at 8pm.
Google is all about achievement...not which hours you choose to work. The fact is that most employees do not stay for dinner. Google people have different work schedules. Some come in early, some stay late, some work 9 to 5 at the office, and get back online at night after the kids go to bed. Some people work from home. There is no pressure to conform to some schedule.
Google is like a college campus. There are people everywhere, all working different schedules. There is always someone around so you never feel alone.
Don
The 400+ people at the Googleplex at 8:00 PM is mostly a reflection of the relative youth of the employee base (median age: 28). When you're young and single, hanging out with friends for dinner certainly beats going home and eating alone.
Google feels a lot like a college campus. Lots of people around at all hours of the day and night. People have different work schedules, but you never feel alone.
Does anyone work strict eight hour days, five days a week?
I've been working pretty consistent 8 hour days lately, noon to 8. Granted, in my last project, I was often working 11-12 hour days + weekends. I think that's only typical if you're on a high profile project with a company-wide push to get it out the door, though. There are 20,000 Googlers; most of them are not on such projects.
You, good sir, should be an entrepreneur.
My kids are 2 and 5. And yes, I was at work last night at 9 PM. How horrible is that?
However I got time with my kids in the morning, arrived around noon, and like having the freedom to commute at a time where I can avoid rush hour traffic.
Google reminds me of the rich kid who tries so hard to let you know how great it is to be rich. It's like, "kid, I just assumed being rich was pretty good, but the more you testify the more I think something is wrong with it".
I don't know enough about him to comment on the former but I bet its a lot of the latter.
Of course, I've never worked at Google, so maybe they all are coding rockstars and save the world on a daily basis. I find that thought a little unsettling though.
At least one of them experienced, consistently and repeatedly, behavior that she could easily have sued over despite multiple complaints to HR.
The job of HR is not to help you, the employee. It is to protect the company. The more credible your complaints to HR look, especially if there was some negligence in your management chain, the more they will try to damage your story or credibility. That's their job.
Though you should probably report it to HR as well.
I know a number of people who work in employment law and I hear stories all of the time how getting accused of sexual harassment will get you rail-roaded out of any modern workplace.
I'm sure there are some totally degenerate companies which will try to cover it up and discredit the accuser, but I can't imagine a place look google is one of them.
Besides all of which, sexual harassment suits are civil suits so I'm not sure what you expect the police to do.
You would think, but reality is sometimes different. The problem is that these things are often he said/she said, and HR does not want to do anything that creates the appearance that one-side is telling the truth, because this opens them up. Or if there was negligence in the past, this makes them vulnerable to federal law. Or if they have a pending lawsuit. I'm not saying every company is out to screw you, but why take an unnecessary chance?
And sexual harassments suits are civil suits (that's kind of a tautology), but sexual harassment itself can be criminal. This is a common incorrect belief you noted. It can even be a felony in some cases. This is why I suggest talking to the police (or an attorney) as you're not likely to know the law in your state (and there is also federal law on the books too).
And why don't you imagine Google is the type to cover something like this up? Is it because of their motto? I don't have as much faith in multibillion dollar corporations as you do.
But Google Earth was an acquisition. So was YouTube, despite the effort they put into Google Video. So was Google Docs word processor, although the spreadsheet was home grown.
Google has, what, 20,000 engineers? That's a LOT of effort for what they have to show for it.
In any case, I consider Google Maps to be through and through a Google product.
that sounds about right! :)
That criticism would hold true if Google were a pure product company. Salesforce is a great example of this: in their SIGMOD/SoCC keynote they've mentioned they only employ 200 engineers. They don't face the sort of scalability and algorithmic challenges that warrants developing custom infrastructure: they use of the shelf commercial products and open source products (Oracle RAC, Lucene).
At Google that great deal of work goes into amazing internal infrastructure that is rarely read about (I'd imagine the published papers are only the tip of an iceberg) i.e., people hacking on the kernel, on file systems, on databases, firmware etc... This infrastructure is their competitive advantage and their moat. At Salesforce, their ability to out execute competitors (via aggressive selling and marketing) on an innovative but not inventive business model.
In the case of Google, being a major contributor to the Linux kernel, they're effectively their own operating systems vendor. With BigTable, MegaStore, Spanner, their MySQL patches and more, they're their own database vendor. With Chubby, GFS, MapReduce, their own web server, etc... they're their own distributed middleware company. They're also one of the largest hardware manufactures, with themselves as their only consumer.
In terms of their core competencies (search/IR/ML), they're an incredible research organization. Not all research results in products, but they've been able to productize their research much more effectively than Microsoft has (perhaps at the cost of having a less theory and more systems focused research organization i.e., employing Rob Pike but not Leslie Lamport).
I have a feeling it's great to be a researcher or an advanced developer (working on infrastructure or algorithms) at Google: you have the capability to focus on actually building incredible pieces of software. In terms of application development, it might be slightly less appealing (although, I've been extremely impressed with Android, Chrome and Gmail as _finished products_ too).
Of course, if someone's _primary_ goal out of a job is to become an enterpreuner and found their own company, going to Google may not be the best place for this (other than for making connections and gaining credibility much like going to Stanford): building an infrastructure start-up is much more difficult than building a web application start-up. For those who are first and foremost technologists (that would be me), Google still symbolizes the "ideal" job: perform incredibly advanced development (implicitly frowned upon in most product companies) and build practical, working software that gets put to production use (implicitly frowned upon in research centers and academia). At one point one such place was AT&T Bell Labs, at a later point it was Sun. Now that place is Google.
1-2) AdWords and AdSense revolutionized web advertising. Those two products generated $6.5 billion in revenue just in Q1 of 2010.
3) Android. Others have commented that this was an acquisition, but that happened in 2005, and it was a relatively small team. I'd wager that most of the current Android code was written after the acquisition, and by engineers who weren't from the original Android team.
4) Chrome.
Regarding the number of engineers, Google had 20,000 employees as of March 2010. You can make your own guess about how many of them are software engineers, but it's a lot less than 100%.
I worked on Google Wonder Wheel, which had a tiny, startup-sized development team. Probably 99.5% of you have never heard of it. However, the people that do use it really like it. Enough that they complained when we temporarily disabled it for the recent visual redesign, another project I worked on. It has orders of magnitude more users than Bingo Card Creator, and has generated orders of magnitude more revenue for Google. Yet you hear about BCC all the time on HN, while maybe once every 6 months somebody might mention Wonder Wheel.
This seems new. Last I checked, Google offered (relatively) low salaries.
I think there are people doing more important work than Google, but I think that very few of them are in the computer industry. I have immense respect for teachers, doctors, nurses, tradespeople, babysitters, etc. But people in financial software, SEO, Web 2.0, defense software? You think that what they're doing is more important than search?
Except its been 5 years since the Pats won a Super Bowl. Feels kind of the same.
"Emergents" -- as opposed to the "Qeng Ho" (sp?), who in contrast seemed more like a bunch of franchise owners* cooperating when they had common goals and/or to make some good trades? (and help a dispersed human civilization along here and there)
* "franchise owner" in the sense of owning and operating a store associated with a broader brand.
"The nice thing about Apple is that we actually have managers that know their shit telling us what to do."
Apple's culture seems much more command & control oriented. They find experienced managers who care passionately about design, then put them in positions where they have both the responsibility and the authority to see that through. Then the individual workers stop at nothing to get every little detail right about the product.
Google's culture is much more chaotic, "bubble-up". They find smart people, put them together, and say "Find something to work on." Then they do everything possible to support whatever ideas emerge from that. Google figures that eventually the market will separate the wheat from the chaff, the best ideas will win, and then they'll pour more resources into those.
I think those differing approaches to product design show very clearly in the products they end up designing. Google sometimes creates brilliantly executed, innovative products that no manager would've thought of. And it often creates pure and utter dreck. Apple's approach results in uniformly beautiful, well-designed products, but they often miss out on opportunities where an awesome product isn't immediately obvious from current consumer desires.
I know it is hard to imagine today that Microsoft was once like this...but they were. In a follow up post I might dive into how they lost that feeling. Personally, I think when the business people started outnumbering the engineering people...is when they started losing their way.
Don
How do you make key partnerships without great tech?
Think about OEM customization, i18n/l10n, backwards compability (etc). If MS didn't know how to do these, history would be different.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
Microsoft was infamous for announcing products that they didn't have ready. This often discouraged corporations from buying competing products.
In this case, business trumped technology.
Isn't having good "business people" the reason why every Fortune 500 company pays huge license fees to Microsoft and not to Google?