Thoughts from my Google tour | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts from my Google tour

ryanwaggoner.com

28 pointsryanwaggoner9 comments

I used to work at Google and outsiders would always speculate about how the perks would disappear if the company stopped making insane amounts of money. There was always an implication that things wouldn't be as rosy then.

Truth is, I would have worked at Google without any of the perks. I now work at a startup that has zero perks. But it has equally hard problems and equally brilliant people. And we are empowered and challenged to do our best. I totally agree the perks are a symptom not a cause.

I reckon a lot of problems with company culture can be solved by granting autonomy, paying a reasonable salary, and keeping the hiring bar uncompromisingly high.

I think the salary thing is almost orthogonal to good culture; there's lots of crappy companies out there paying good or great salaries.

The granting autonomy thing is probably the most important one, but that's really hard to do if you don't already have a good culture. It requires a lot of trust and respect that crappy companies just don't have.

As for keeping the hiring bar uncompromisingly high, that's a chicken and egg problem for many companies, because they don't have a good enough reputation to attract the best talent in the first place.

Absolutely. A previous company I worked at had a horrible company culture, but they paid really well. No respect, no autonomy, no hope. In the end, the money wasn't important. I couldn't stand working there anymore and left for a job that paid 30% less but had a much nicer working environment. My overall quality of life went way up.

Don't hang around working for clueless bullies and assholes, thinking "the money makes it ok". It doesn't.

Hmm you seem to have taken each of my points in isolation. I was actually AND'ing them, not OR'ing.

No, I know what you meant, and I agree that that combination makes for a killer culture, but I think it's really difficult to pull off unless you already have a good culture, particularly #2 and #3.

I blogged earlier this year about companies that try to copy the beanbags, but miss the point (cargo cult startups)

http://blog.thinkst.com/2010/04/cargo-cult-startups.html

The culture at Google is probably also driven by the fact that it's such an academic environment (in addition to the fact that there's a lot of pro-engineer sentiment). Facebook has an engineer-driven culture and it's apparently an awesome environment for programmers but according to Paul Buchheit (who has worked at both places) it feels a lot more like dorm room hacker culture and is totally different from Google.

He talks more about company culture here: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/11/facebooks...

From friends who have worked at FB (in particular, both FB and Google) they report that the culture is a little strange and affected: Mark and others put a big emphasis on the importance of their 'hacker culture,' but try to create said culture through the exhortations to protect it... [?]

Anyway, I can't vouch for Facebook one way or another, but I can say that Google certainly has a very strong culture, although it waxes and wanes depending on where in the company you may be, and can take on different characteristics by business function. Also, you really can only get a certain snapshot by visiting, versus actually working there!

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