How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)

Funny, my experience is the opposite on literally every concrete assertion about people and motivations.

Looking at my team, and the broader team under my director, only one was hired "straight out of college". Well, if you consider fresh PhDs to be "straight out of college", there are a few, but I doubt Aaron meant folks approaching 30 with kids on the horizon when he was talking about people just out of college.

Perhaps a couple are cynical, but I wouldn't call any childish or enthusiastically adolescent, which isn't too surprising, considering that the median employee within two levels of management of me is mid-thirties with two kids.

We have a couple of visiting scientists (professors at major research universities), and they were surprised by what we're doing, so perhaps the secrecy doesn't do such a bad job of keeping things inside the company after all.

I don't doubt Aaron's experience, but it's exactly what you'd expect due to selection bias. How old was Aaron when he wrote that, 20? He probably wasn't hanging out with the median person from my team. There's nothing wrong with that. But, all things considered, that essay contains a lot of awfully strong assertions.

I'm 42. Most of the people I work with are in the 30s and 40s and have children. The stereotype of Google hiring nothing but Stanford grads has been over for a while.

As much as I like Aaron, here he is guilty of excessive generalization. Even in 2006 the claims don't match reality. I lived through the first dot.com boom in CA, where companies were falling hand over fist to offer perks, many of them financially unsustainable, because there was a huge competition to acquire and keep talent, as well as keep them in the office for long hours with the promise of striking it rich on what were often worthless stock options.

Google is pretty clear and upfront about what the compensation will be. Everything I was told about what to expect about stock grants, year bonuses, and benefits, has more or less hit the predicted windows. I was never really oversold on what my compensation would be and I was able to do financial planning around it because it was so transparent.

I also don't see what's wrong with 'infantilizing'. We lose creativity as we become adults because of the sheer numbers of rules, responsibilities, and requirements placed on us. If you want people to do good research or engineering, take away as much as possible impediments, like worry over money, laundry, or corporate politicking.

Do we also talk about Phd students and tenured professors in research labs being "infantilized" by an academic environment often isolated from the outside world? I don't view it as necessarily a bad thing. Although I guess you could claim that Einstein still did good work while working at the Patent Office.

All in all the essay is a rather convoluted and weak critique of Google culture and hiring practices based on anecdotal observations that don't match reality.

I don't work at Google and from where I sit now, it's hard to imagine myself wanting to work for Google, but this complaint that it's infantalizing its employees is ridiculous. Making your own food and doing your own laundry are not substantial life challenges. Growing up is not about learning to do chores you don't actually have to do. (When you make enough money to pay someone to mow your lawn, are you back to being a little kid?) The whole article is premised on the idea that the status quo in which most adults do have to do (or choose to do) their laundry is somehow intrinsically superior, which is just silly. Think of all the other services you don't do yourself, or even that your grandparents do but which now come in the form of a household appliance. Why do some services go in the bucket labeled "self-sufficiency" and all the other ones don't?

Growing up is also not about throwing out the brightly colored things and getting rid of the spaceship models. Why would you think that? Because someone told you to act like a Real Adult? Because when you grow up, you need to trade in your dinosaurs for responsible abstract art or else...well, what, exactly? Growing up is about taking responsibility for yourself. That's basically it. Maybe Google is preventing that too, but this article doesn't make that case.

I guess on some level this is true. Is there some place where you can work and get money for doing whatever you want, and defying authority whenever you want? If so, sign me up!

Over in the real world, working for an employer like Google is a risk hedge. If your idea for a project this quarter turns out to not be useful, you don't run out of money and end up living in a cardboard box. You learn from your experience, try again, and your family gets food on the table. You can say it's childish to hedge risk, but you can also say it's very adult to hedge risk. Maybe you are a super genius that can code up a solution to a really hard problem all by yourself. But what if the market doesn't like it? Too bad, you're in the same place as the guy who sits at home all day, smokes pot, and watches daytime TV. The market decided: you suck.

I agree with Aaron that we could always use more computers. Sometimes during peak hours, the batch scheduler will only give me a few hundred machines to run my MapReduce on. What am I, a farmer?

Ultimately, I like working at Google and I like having toys in the office. I have Nerf guns. I use Hakase from Nichijou as my profile picture. At the same time, I feel like I'm doing impactful work, with some very smart people. And I feel that I'm evaluated (and compensated) fairly. Does that make me infantile? Maybe so. But I like it.

My real fear of leaving Google is the time I'll have to spend writing all the infrastructure from scratch. And finding someone else that can afford my hourly rate.

A month earlier, Aaron wrote about his experiences working in a more traditional kind of office:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/officespace

> Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first day I showed up here, I simply couldn’t take it. By lunch time I had literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying.

So I'm not sure what kind of office would have ever met his approval.

This article always struck me as being composed of two distinctly different opinions. One, Aaron's assertion that employees at Google are being infantilized. Two, that Google's mission and their overall morale and sense of purpose has changed.

Two may be true; I can't speak but anecdotally to this (and nor could he).

But One always struck me as very mean-spirited and unnecessary. As if told by the father in Peter Pan, or Scrooge. As if Google's engineers should be wearing suits (like the "lowlifes" he so despises?) and sitting in Aeron chairs, only, and forgetting about such silly things as dinosaurs and space travel.

I don't think this is really accurate. It's not about treating people like kids, it's about rejecting the attitude found at dilbert-style corporations.

The T-Rex skeleton and the shark fins are there because they're cool. Google has monorail cars as meeting rooms in the Sydney office [1] - because an engineer requested it. It shows that management listens to employees. It gives people the confidence to propose somewhat outlandish ideas, because if management will buy a monorail because an employee requests it, management will allocate resources to things that actually matter because employees request it. Those stories don't get publicized, but I've seen it happen multiple times.

Also, the idea that all google employees are young kids just out of college who are being shielded from "the real world" by free food and buses is silly, many of my coworkers are married with kids.

[1] https://plus.google.com/+PaulCowan/posts/Sfm9SpV4eCE

I work for google, but I'm not speaking on their behalf.

Working at Google I feel the opposite of infantilised. I am given nearly total autonomy to do my job how I see fit (and shouldn't i? Nobody knows my job better than me). I can book business travel, order essential equipment, and even start new work spontaneously without wasting time seeking approval. I set my own goals and am the judged by how well I meet them.

I feel that traditional offices are more infantlilising in that they assume most workers need explicit instructions to get their work done and must seek approval to do anything out of the ordinary.

Aaron here is distracted by the shiny things. As an employee you very quickly become accustomed to the benefits and spend more time just getting work done.

I thought it looked creepy, like an adult daycare center.

I was approached twice and interviewed twice by Google but I don't think I'd fit that culture.

No offices -- just open spaces.

A meritocracy where you are evaluated by your peers generally, rather than by a boss or customer for your merits in a particular job.

Where you don't even know what you will be working on until you're hired, as if that gives you a choice.

Lots of silly signs hanging, some of which would be trademark violations if displayed in public (Bombay Sapphire, etc.).

Too academic (from Stanford days?) for my tastes.

Right after college, I was enticed by these perks: free food, laundry services, etc. After a few years in industry, I became more interested in the less sexy but more substantive benefits like a competitive salary, a 401K and good medical coverage.

College-like perks and grown-up perks are not always mutually exclusive. My understanding is that Google pays developers well and offers great benefits.

However, my experience has been that some tech companies emphasize their college-like benefits in lieu of providing strong adult benefits. "Stock options? Who needs stock options when you have beanbag chairs?"

If a company is going to play up its college-like perks, it should also bring to the table substantive financial and health-related benefits. Otherwise I can see how it would be difficult to retain young developers as their priorities change.

You can't judge infantile behaviour from the presence of dinosaurs. I'm a woman in my mid 20s, I still have a fluffy snake from when I was 12 that I like to stroke when I'm thinking.

Oh no! People derive pleasure from things you no-longer do.

There's a difference between being mature and being solemn. Far too often I see the latter being treated as the former. Being mature is about responsibility, managing your own life, growing to understand what you enjoy and how you relate to others. A lot of people who think they're very adult, just because they don't have fluffy snakes and the like any more... a lot of them I don't see as adults; who've thought about their happiness and responsibilities; I see sad teenagers.

Creatives (designers, engineers, etc.) with optionality (at the caliber that Google would hire) pine for freelance-like working conditions (not referring to pay, but rather creative control, flexible hours, and amenities). These tech firms try to absorb as many of those benefits as possible to woo over employees. In Google's early days, maybe employees had greater creative control over their projects-- hence creating more autonomous and creative working conditions. However, as a company scales, you inevitably lose your creative control and become a cog in the larger machine. No perks can veil this, hence the changing of Googlers' mentalities.

Unless you're at the top of one of these large firms, I have a really hard time imagining any creative and truly autonomous person willing to work for more than a year at any of these institutions before breaking free and either founding a startup, joining an early stage startup, or freelancing.

Who maintains/pays for the site now? I tried going to the top page, expecting some kind of obituary or explanation as to why the site is still up, but the blurb there makes it sound like Aaron stepped out for a week and will be updating again soon, except for the last updated note in the corner.

I did a whois lookup out of curiosity, but the contact information all refers to contactprivacy.com, which is apparently set up to allow people to register domains privately.

Google is a mammoth. Generalising it would be similar to doing the same of a whole country. I do not work there but know many that have that speak so highly of its foundations. Like some sort of new form of knowledge discovery and expansion of thought. While it may be infantile this could just as well be seen as an advantage, at least for a while to come. It is one of the frontiers of innovation for company building (and nation building for that matter): keeping people feeling, thinking and innovating like children. However, Aaron was right and this is not enough to keep some great talent from slipping through.

I had two run-ins with Google HR. Once after they purchased a company that had a product that I was a primary architect and programmer for. Part of the reason the process staled was because I explained "I consider programming like hammering nails. I program. I am not a programmer". I found their questions on what languages I program with to be silly. The other reason it staled had to do with their inability to discuss practical "projects" we could "work on together". It's as if Google is an Amish parent wanting to offer you their daughter in marriage with you committing before even getting a decent look at her.

To their credit the words "projects" and "work on together" coming from a potential hire are foreign to all companies. But if Google wants to avoid becoming Xerox in 30 years they would do well to understand this language and hire more like Al Qaeda rather than Ikea.

Developing a more network based structure is not that difficult to envision. For starters get rid of "%20 time", it's a joke. Instead I could imagine something more like: %25 on mandated work, %25 on google projects (what used to be %20 time), %50 time on projects entirely of your choosing that would be handled like an investment (with yearly reviews of direction as a board of a company would) and finally abolishment of most vacation days with vacation taken at will from the %50 and in any form (clustered, by day, half days, whatever). Full time creativity is a form of cognitive dissidence fostered only by industrial era thinking. Creative workers should be given the option to take minor or major pay cuts dynamically and at will in order to replenish their energy. Whereas today, asking for extra time off, even with a cut in pay, carries a lot of guilt for most. Such a structure as described, when monitored, also provides valuable feedback on the health of the employee and company. When you get something like this Google, hit me up on Pond.

Simply not true in 2013. They are aggressively hiring engineers of all sorts. College degrees are less relevant. Google, of all companies, have developed some of the finest talent recognition software in the valley.

Growing up is overrated anyway.

I transferred to the Motorola division so I kind of have both perspectives while being at Google.

In some regard, a lot of Googlers don't even know how good they have it. What Google manages to do pretty well is pick the right people for 'the company' and then acclimatize them extremely fast to everything: process, tools, lifestyle and sometimes koolaid.

In doing so are we infants? Perhaps. But fundamentally this is no different than what all children go through (acclimatization to their environment).

I'm not sure working for some crummy company, or a startup means one life is better than the other - they are different. And if you're lucky enough to be able to choose that then that is awesome.

Claims that other people are "infantile" are almost always just a pissing contest. It's an easy way to put someone down since being infantile is hard to define, and making that claim already sets you up as the more mature person in the conversion.

And the idea that having stuff done for you is equivalent to being treated like a kid says more about the psychological issues of the author than reality. Our entire economy is based around exchanging services for money. Google takes it to a (slightly) higher level, although the only perk that people use in real life is the food.

This is typical western philosophical bullsh. As life becomes easier in Western world, people have more time to fret about such inconsequential things. Please carry on!

The Google = slimy politician comparison really undercuts the detached perspective that he's hoping to impart to Googlers or potential Googlers.

> Even the suburban desert of Mountain View is better.

haha, i think mountain view is actually quite a quaint little town compared to sun-beat santa clara, which really isn't so bad either. (aaah, i miss the weather, i do.)

but heck, the late aaron swartz lamenting an HR tact that pervades so many of the companies, software and otherwise, hiring math & science "types?" holiday stylesheet or no, it's a depressing read.

read this before noticing it was written in 2006 by Aaron Schwartz. That certainly colors the perspective. I wonder how much has changed.

Something that sounds like an ideal is nothing like what you would expect it to be?

That's like every other thing in the world ever, isn't it?

Infantilizing not infantile. Loss of potential given the strong potential of many Googlers. His insight into opportunity costs is bright if slightly imperfect, as always, I'd say.

This is more a complaint against people not solving hard problems enough (a la Steve Yegge) than a complaint against bean bags - those are just metaphors.

I recently got an interview with Google (didn't get it), I'd kill to work with them. Even if they pay a bit less than what I'm currently getting, if it means I'll work on something less boring than what I'm doing now (typical business corporate bs where I'm working pretty much by myself).

Very silly article. There are so many things wrong but i will comment on the first para. T any about living your life when most people seem to be outsourcing even bringing up children in the bay area since they have to work. Laundry and food are hardly about living your life.

I thought HN's algo drove controversial stories off the front page. This is generating a bunch of arguments and yet it's still here. There are other stories I've commented on that get knocked off the front page with less drama than I'm seeing here.

That is what you would expect it to be, too. I see them dominating the world for next 2 years at least but where they go there will determine how strong the vision is of the founders.

In times like these, I'm minded to beware the echo chamber. Coz I'm very poor at telling when I've fallen into one.

>"People read the airbrushed versions of Google technologies in talks and academic papers and think that Google has some amazingly large computer lab with amazingly powerful technology."

Latest acquisition of "Boston Dynamics" and team working at "Google X" and other projects lead to second thought . In the end it's choice of people , we should not have say in what they should or shouldn't.

If I had a talent I would write about companies treating their employees like criminals

The tl;dr is Google Google Goo.

Hm. I feel like Google is following Diamond Age's tips on how to train their engineers. There's a pretty great passage in there about this, and you owe it to yourself to read it. It reads more like a prophecy than a sci-fi book, but it's super good. :)

counterpoint: growing up != performing life-taking tasks like laundry.

Hey, did you also here that there are NO trees on their campus?

RIP