Google’s secret perk? A private hackerspace | Hacker News Reader

Google’s secret perk? A private hackerspace

hackaday.com

199 pointsyan53 comments

I've actually worked at Google and been certified to use all of the shops including welding and metalworking. And the industrial grade heavy duty plasma cutter. The shops are really cool and they serve a slightly different purpose than for example TechShop. At TechShop a lot of the tinkering is more social, the Google shops are definitely less crowded. We run a similar much smaller shop at Tinkercad and I hope to expand that one in the future as well. The only gripe I have is that the campus is large enough that the Pi shops are a short distance away so you might not drop down there as often as you would like. That said the EE shop was pretty close to core campus.

As for the certification and elitism. The cert process was very straightforward and relevant. People easily forget that metalworking and some woodworking machines don't let you learn by experimenting. These machines kill in seconds, sometimes for mistakes that are very unintuitive. Like wearing gloves has killed several people. Which is unintuitive when you are handling razor sharp pieces of metal. Or the recent fatal accident at Yale where student was pulled in by her hair.

As for the particulars of Ihab. He is a very smart and diligent guy but he had very little practical machine shop experience. He recognized it himself and took classes to compensate. These standards aren't high just due to Rod, but because most Googlers are smart enough to be critical of their own skills when faced with lethal equipment.

Re-posted from this earlier thread on the same subject: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2487979

Edit: s/MIT/Yale/ for the lathe accident. Thanks.

An except from the spiel at a company I am not at liberty to name: There is no machine in this facility which is incapable of killing you. Study your checklists. They will protect you, your colleagues, and the company. Never violate one of the rules, not ever, not even once. See these yellow lines on the floor? To cross them is to die. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day when you're tired at the end of a long shift thinking about your girlfriend you won't see $A_PARTICULAR_MACHINE in time, it will hit you in the head, and I will have to explain to her why I did not keep you alive. I will keep you alive. Checklists. Yellow lines. Do not forget.

I've done some amount of aviation, both civilian and military, and our training officers were always fond of reminding us that the history of most aviation guidelines could be traced back to a death or two. I think it's easy to forget, coming from a profession that is inherently experimental and forgiving, that some mistakes can only be made once.

It's pretty common for machinists in most industries (including aerospace) to lack college degrees. Studying engineering in college typically has little relevance to operating a bandsaw. A safety knowledge test before having access to the shop is standard and common sense, not elitist.

They do have degrees, just not the one you'll get from a 4-year university. The time of getting a job at the factory right after high school is long past. The machine tools these days are quite complex and very expensive. Like 6 axis CNCs with incredibly flexibly degrees of freedom.

Also, a lot of modern machinists have, even, a basic understanding of materiel science. They might not have taken all the courses to graduate with an engineering degree but they aren't that far off.

I worked at a machine shop as a teenager and the machinist there always said, "you computer guys have it easy. You make a mistake, you just press backspace. If I make a mistake with one of these machines it's either going to cost a couple grand or I'll need a new hand."

> Like wearing gloves has killed several people.

This is interesting. How/when are gloves dangerous? I've been TIG welding for about a year now, I self-studied my way through a welding textbook[1] and have friends who are professional welders (union pipe-fitters, etc) and have never heard anything about gloves being dangerous. In fact according to the pipe-fitters, gloves are in the category of eye and head protection of "must be worn on a union jobsite."

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Welding-William-Bowditch/dp/156...

This was a reference to the machine shop in general and lathes in particular. Cloth will sooner or later get caught in rotating machinery. This is the same reason why machinists don't wear long sleeved shirts. I haven't heard of any glove type being exempt from this rule. Hair and beards are definitely discouraged as well. When I was in the air force wedding bands were discouraged during ground battle exercises given the ease of getting caught on something and losing a finger.

I think this is a good example of why the safety guidelines are strict and mostly require rote learning. Gloves protect against heat, but everything you have been plasma cutting or welding needs to be handled with tongs because even if the metal doesn't glow it's probably still pretty hot. Most of these rules make sense in retrospect, but they are universally hard to deduce from first principles.

Gloves protect against heat, but everything you have been plasma cutting or welding needs to be handled with tongs because even if the metal doesn't glow it's probably still pretty hot.

This is very true. I haven't welded since high school, but a single arc weld can get a piece of metal hot enough to burn almost instantly through heavy leather gloves.

As someone with light machine shop experience (building things in my ME schooling) gloves are dangerous on machines like mills (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milling_machine) where they are spinning so fast when they catch the glove you will not be able to brake and you most likely will not have parts or all of your hand.

Yeah I suppose that makes sense with milling machines. When I read the OP's comment I was thinking he was referring to grinding machines.

I always wear my TIG gloves when operating grinders and was glad I do a while back when my hand made contact with the wheel: what would have been a nasty and painful gash ended up being a scuff mark on my glove.

But that raises another question: Why on earth would your hand be anywhere near the head of an operating milling machine?

EDIT: Thinking about this more, we might have different concepts of "glove." TIG gloves are thin, tight-fitting, and leather.

They also have a "gauntlet type" cut that extends up your forearms and over your sleeves. I don't think they'd be any more likely to catch a machine part than your skin would, and I think they'd actually reduce the chance that a sleeve gets caught.

OTOH, it makes sense that the thick, heavy fabric gloves that are used for MIG or stick would make your hands more clumsy and prone to getting caught in machines. I agree that those are probably pretty dangerous.

Why on earth would your hand be anywhere near the head of an operating milling machine?

Accidents happen. You slip, or get tired and careless and then suddenly your hand isn't where you expect it to be. On a manual mill, it's more likely that your face, not hand will be closer to the bit as you monitor how it's cutting.

A chemistry senior was killed by a lathe at Yale last week working alone late at night when she was pulled against the machine by her hair.

An average size lathe with a 6" chuck will pull 18" of hair in a single revolution. At a moderate speed of 300 rpm that's too fast for a person to react. In the battle of human vs. 3hp motor, human loses. I've seen enough photos of human bodies turned into hamburger by even small industrial machines to not take the danger seriously!

The grinder -- the one you use to sharpen your tungsten tips for TIG welding -- at the machine shop I where I learned to weld had signs all over it reminding you to take off your gloves before turning the spinning grinder wheels on.

That shop, at the local community college, is the only one I've ever used, so I can't guess what practice is more common.

your hands need to be near the tool in a mill for a couple of reasons, including clearing chips and applying oil/coolant.

also when you zero out a mill, you need to touch off a tool (don't know the name) to define your origin spot. it's not sharp and you should spin it at low RPM, but it's still moving, and you shouldn't have gloves anywhere near it.

My brother lost two fingers trying to stop rotating part of powered off machine by bare hand 25 years ago.

People can be stupid, even the smart ones.

That is probably the only reason training is so important.

Wouldn't they catch a bare hand the same way? How does not wearing gloves help?

A bare hand would probably just be cut badly. A hand with gloves can be pulled into a cutting tool that will then dismember your arm.

Fabric is just so much easier to catch thats why things like short sleeves and no gloves are so important, it is probably much less likely for your hand/arm to get wound around the machine because the muscle and skin doesn't catch as easily.

But yes you'd end up hurt either way.

Gloves are dangerous because they will not tear like skin. The mill will continue rotating as it rotates then arm around the bit, usually about 1" in diameter. So think about how your bones would be crushed to spiral around the bit. The blood loss would be so rapid you would probably die. If you are by yourself, the pain will probably cause you to faint and die.

Leather and clothe gloves are not allowed around rotating machinery for that reason. Latex would be okay.

(A small note, that lathe incident was in Yale)

edit: s/Columbia/Yale/

It was actually at Yale.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/nyregion/yale-student-dies...

That is an awful story. It is, however, one that will be cited at every machine shop and woodworking class from now on.

This could easily have been any of my peers in graduate school. Lots of us did work late at night, and there are lots and lots of ways to injure or kill yourself with shop equipment. You have to take the work very seriously, be sure you are alert, and whenever possible do your work when other people are around.

Meanwhile: You really, really want the supervisor of your machine shop to be a merciless drill instructor [1] who takes no crap. And you want the people who can't pass boot camp to be sent home without a key to the shop. Why?

A) You, yourself, need more training than you think.

B) Even if you are an expert, you want to be very sure that the person working next to you is trained. You may not be the person who makes the mistake, but you could still be the person who gets electrocuted, or struck by flying parts from a nearby spinning lathe, or crippled when you slip on the spilled oil and drop the hundred-pound vise on your foot [2], or injured by the broken machine that wasn't properly taken offline, labeled, and locked.

C) It's not just the fatal mistakes that will drive you crazy. I've worked in a lot of shared shops. They will waste your time. Waste it by the month and by the year. Because the equipment gets dented, or stripped, or burned out, or rusted, or dirty. It only takes one incompetent or un-conscientious person to ruin something. Entropy is annoying that way.

There's a reason why, e.g., every machinist has their own little box of tool bits and chisels and favorite screwdrivers, and why chefs never let other chefs use their knives.

---

[1] The similarities between good infantrymen or sailors and good machinists (or contractors or modern farmers, for that matter) have been remarked upon before. In all these cases, you're constantly putting your life in the hands of the equipment that's being maintained by your peers.

[2] When your shop instructor gives you the lecture about the steel-toed boots for god's sake get some steel-toed boots and wear them.

I'll actually be at Google this summer for an internship and would love access to the EE shop. Do you know if there are restrictions for interns? Also, most of my work has been tinkering by myself rather than formal training. Is there anything you'd recommend looking at before trying to gain access? Or even a class or something I could take?

If you'd rather discuss this off HN, my e-mail is in my comments.

The electronics shop is fairly easy; it was the only one I had access to. Like you, I learned by tinkering. The only thing in the electronics lab that will hurt you is the soldering iron, so as long as you know which end of that is hot, you should be good.

That said, I have some memory of the shops being fulltime-only. Once you get to Google, go to http://goto/workshops; full details are there.

I can't remember if there was an intern limitation, but I don't recall there was one. That said, I no longer work there so I'm not clear on the current requirements. I remember that access to the EE shop is pretty easy to come by. Ask your mentor and/or google the internal page to figure out how things work.

Edit: If you want to get more info mail me at kai tinkercad.com.

BTW - Thank you for Tinkercad!

I was at Noisebridge last night and talking about best ways to create STL files for the makerbots there.

Currently, it only supports adding and subtracting geometry - will you be able to pull/push edges/points?

There is no sphere (convex/concave tools), will that be added?

Cool. I'm happy you guys find it useful! Feel free to ping me at kai at tinkercad.com if you guys have any specific issues.

We are thinking about all of those things but some of them might take a bit of time. The internal representation of Tinkercad is a true volumetric format, even simple models would take gigabytes uncompressed, which is why we store them in a cluster. The upside is that our boolean operations are rock solid and the STL:s well defined. The downside is that doing a push pull operation literally means moving the equivalent of digital dirt around.. :-)

Would it then be possible to have the ability to adjust the reference plane at a specific angle.

Have a dial and text box for saying the reference plane should be "45 degrees to the Z axis"

This would allow one to use the existing tools a bit more precisely.

This is an excellent suggestion. It's good enough that I used the company time machine to port it back to our iteration planning two weeks ago. Sadly our UI engineer is picky and he hasn't been satisfied with any of the five prototypes he wrote during last week.

So, that makes it two of us who are eagerly waiting for the ability to rotate work planes.. :-)

This is now live, you can activate it using the workplane tool and selecting "Adjust". The UI will change a bit, give us feedback through the app if you have input.

Thank you for this reply, I redact my indignant post :)

This sounds a lot like the design studio at Apple. It's basically Jony Ive and ~10 designers who have full rights to prototype new products, even if they're completely random. I think a telling difference is the fact that this is a part of the core myth of Apple and the emphasis on beautiful design and small teams. It's not some hidden away secret.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1367481/Appl... - "Jobs swiftly brought Ive in from the cold, moving the designers into a building on campus and investing in the latest rapid-prototyping equipment. He also beefed up Apple’s security, locking down the design studio to prevent leaks and installing a private kitchen so designers wouldn’t talk shop in public.

Sounds nothing like it actually - this one being open to any employee who wishes to take advantage of it, the other one being a private perk for a top exec and his close associates.

And I doubt the Apple shop has welders or bandsaws.

They certainly have bandsaws

Awesome.

I'm personally so much more of a software hacker. But I do have a friend that can do all kinds of hardware hacks, from woodwork to welding. He loves doing it too, but often hits a roadblock with certain ideas since he doesn't have the required machinery and is currently employed outside this field of work. And without the funds, also doesn't have the opportunity to go very far with his hobby.

Unfortunately, he also doesn't have the software background to work at Google. It's an amazing perk they offer for sure. It'd be really cool if they expanded this to allow some non-computer geeks to pitch in every now and then though.

This is incredible. I think Google is doing a great job of transitioning from a startup to a big company. They have so many things like this, 20% time, and letting tech guys focus on tech and still get promotions. I feel like they are trying to make themselves the Mecca for brilliant technologists. If you aren't a startup with an "us" against the world mentality, you have to add compelling reasons to attract talent.

transitioning? they've had over 20,000 employees for a few years now. you cease to be a startup after you've started up. for them that probably happened around 1998-2000.

IBM has 426,000. AT&T has 294,000. GE has 287,000. Those are big companies at least in the tech community.

TechShop in SOMA (San Francisco) has similar machinery and equipment, from the sound of it. http://techshop.ws/ A potential perk for SF-based startups could be access to shops like this. Buying all that equipment is expensive. Austin TX has a similar communal workspace http://www.makeatx.com/ and I'm sure similar spaces exist in other cities.

Very interesting, I wish there were some more pictures of the inside of the shop itself. Knowing Google, I'm sure everything in there is top of the line.

def jealous

I bet that's where SkyNet will be built. (Has been built?)

Even within a small company cliques are a fact of life. But, something about the way this is worded seems...awful?

"which is open to any employee that meets some pretty strict requirements. A written test is given before an employee can access the facilities, and even then they must be deemed worthy of working on particular pieces of equipment"

I'd like to assume this is a safety issue, but this is Google which is known to be pretty elitist. Some employees will always get more perks than others (more money, more vacation time, more options...). Part of the very nature of picking "haves" is that you inherently devalue the "have-nots".

One step forward for having a more streamlined interview process, one step back for having interviews/tests for access to perks even after you're employed.

Umm... this doesn't sound 'elitist', it sounds like 'health and safety requirement' alone. My university opened up a facility like this when I was there, and had very similar requirements. That said, I (nor anyone else I've heard of) don't have any specific information about this lab/workshop...

It's a safety issue. Pressurized acetylene must be treated with great respect, and just the other day I read about a chem student that was killed in a lathe accident at Yale.

thanks for explaining. Still seems a bit like having a golf course and only letting employees with a certain handicap play. Maybe they could balance this out by offering an area with less dangerous equipment and/or lessons/instructors/supervision for everyone else.

If your golf handicap is "liable to kill someone", I'm fine with you being banned from the course.

Yes, golf and caber tossing both come from Scotland. No, that doesn't mean they mix.

When I still worked for Google the shops were split into four rooms with separate certification process and access for each. It was easy to get access to the EE or Woodworking shop, harder for the Metalworking and Welding.

Only certain employees at home depot can use the power saw to rip lumber. I doubt that is a sign of latent elitism.

I be more concerned if google let any employee walk in and pick up a torch. If you want to be paranoid not having certification requirements would be evidence of some scary social darwinistic elitism.

I guess it's the same in any company with "dangerous areas", and has nothing to do with elitism, but with common sense.

I work at a company that produces lithography machines, and to get access to the clean-rooms you have to do all kinds of extra courses and tests, depending on the kind of technology used in there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com