> Google likes to solve tough problems on a global scale. People work hard...and love it. Most nights I work late and eat dinner at Google. Last night there were at least 400 people eating dinner at 8:00PM. Larry Page was there too, sitting at the table next to me. This is not unusual. When you are achieving goals and being recognized for your work...it doesn't feel like work. Again, to use the New England Patriots analogy, you put everything you've got into it every single day, but when you are doing it alongside the best in the world, it is a privilege and doesn't seem like work at all.
Ok, I can definitely see that. On the other hand... if I weren't home for dinner, my daughter would wonder where 'dada' was.
Seconded. Being home for supper w/ wife and two-year-old son is the highlight of my day.
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.
"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.
Most of the Googlers I know with kids don't stay for dinner, or they'll grab dinner and go (which technically you're not supposed to do, but they work hard the rest of the day...)
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.
I totally agree. Most don't stay for dinner. Many go home, have dinner with their family, and get back on line from home later. Everyone is free to do what they need to do. There is no pressure from anyone.
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.
I think there are some. I know some people who go home around 5:15, every day. I'm not entirely sure when they get in, but I think it's around 9:00, +- 15 minutes.
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.
When you have a family and lots of outside obligations, you lose the ability to take risk and gain large rewards in favor of increased stability. It's not a matter of one being better than the other. These people work extremely hard and contribute in ways that they find meaningful. Nobody should be criticized for being dedicated.
How is working for Google, one of the world's most profitable companies, taking a risk?
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.
When you have a family that you love and enjoy you already have the large reward. Work you enjoy is icing on top of that. The reason you may seek less risk with family is that the upside is relatively small (it will always be dwarfed by family), and the downside is large (losing your home, putting financial stress on your family, etc..).
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.
Ken, There is NO implicit criticism of people who don't work nights, and none was intended. Sorry if you came away with that impression.
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.
The "I can definitely see that" part of my comment was because I really can. I work well at that time of day and there are times when I would love to just keep cranking away. Maybe some of them, like btilly says, get there late. I could see that working: spend some time with the kid(s) in the morning and then work later.
Maybe they're not morning people? I sometimes get on a bad cycle of work late, stay up late, sleep in, and get into work at 11 the next day. It's not because anyone asked me to keep this schedule.
Each person has freedom to find their own balance.
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.
I'm with you. I'm younger but still, the idea of sitting at WORK at 8pm eating dinner next to a billionaire and countless early employee millionaires while making them all even richer sort of turns my god damn stomach.
I think that's a good litmus test. If a job at hot company xyz sounds more like 'wage slavery' than 'great career opportunity', you know you should be an entrepreneur.
Sounds really really sales-pitchy. I'm sure its a great place to work, but when you first six months are all roses, it just sounds fake to me. Maybe it really is all roses, but then that wouldn't explain why some people leave for jobs that look like almost worse positions at other companies (e.g., Eric Tseng).
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".
To work at Microsoft for the past few years and strongly evangelize it takes a certain kind of person. It means the person either is dishonest or looks at the company he works for with Rose Colored Goggles.
I don't know enough about him to comment on the former but I bet its a lot of the latter.
Google sounds more and more like a boys club lately. I think some of the employees need to come back down to earth and realize that not everyone at Google is a coding rockstar and there are people doing more important work than Google.
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.
The "boys club" analogy doesn't end there. According to several of my female techy friends who have worked there, it's a pretty awful place to work if you're female, in terms of sexual discrimination.
At least one of them experienced, consistently and repeatedly, behavior that she could easily have sued over despite multiple complaints to HR.
One of the things I've learned is never report things like that to HR. Report them to the police.
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.
Helping the company and helping the harassed are not exclusive. If there is someone who is truly harassing employees, it behooves the company to get rid of them as quickly as possible because people like that are a tremendous liability.
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.
"Helping the company and helping the harassed are not exclusive. If there is someone who is truly harassing employees, it behooves the company to get rid of them as quickly as possible because people like that are a tremendous liability."
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.
It's 20K people and you're hiring the geek squad, there's bound to be weird people. However, from what I've seen, they were very sensitive about this, especially the women/men employee ratio. I was told during a visit some years ago that this was about 40%. I found that incredible.
It's probably 40% overall, but that includes large concentrations of women in HR and sales. I've heard that engineering is about 10% female. They also tend to clump together on certain teams, for some reason: my first two teams (and second cubicle) were each about 40% female, then my last two teams have been 100% male, at least among the engineers.
I'm not surprised. I can imagine that many of those engineers cooped up in the googleplex for the vast majority of their waking hours, not leaving for lunch, not leaving for dinner, might kinda start to forget how to interact with women altogether.
What are the great products to come out of Google? Search, of course. Google Maps, and with it, AJAX: pretty impressive. GMail too.
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.
Google Reader is best in its class, in my opinion (although I have dozens of RSS feeds, not hundreds.) Google Books is great and represents a huge amount of effort. I don't know where Blogger came from, but Google has had it for a long time; Chrome is fantastic and getting better fast; Google's machine translation of webpages seems to be getting better constantly. Google App Engine, Google Scholar, Google Voice (acquired recently, though,) Google Code (good until Github ate its lunch in my opinion.)
Okay, but apart from Google Search, Google Maps, Gmail, AJAX, Google Earth, YouTube, Google Scholar, Google Calculator, Google Apps, Blogger, Google App Engine, Google Voice, Google Code, AdWords, Google.org, Google Video, Froogle, iGoogle, Google Translate, Google News, Google Image Search, MapReduce, Google Finance, Google Calendar, Chrome, Android, Orkut, Picasa, Knol (OK, forget Knol), Sketchup, Latitude, and Google Pacman, what else has Google done for us?
I think your perspective may also be distorted by all the famous products out there.
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.
Here are a few enormously successful (and highly complex) products that you missed:
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%.
It was acquired young, though, and has been completely rewritten at least once. And as of three years ago, none of the originals were still working on it. Lars went on to build Walkabout/Wave, and I'm not sure what happened to Jens.
In any case, I consider Google Maps to be through and through a Google product.
Does it matter if it was an acquisition? I assume they acquired most of the engineers with it, so it's a partial answer to "what the hell are all those engineers doing?"
> Google has, what, 20,000 engineers? That's a LOT of effort for what they have to show for it.
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.
That's why I said "another acquisition". Android was presumably a less developed acquisition, and the team was significantly beefed up inside Google before producing any first results. Or is that way off?
"there are people doing more important work than Google."
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?
If you have a family, you simply don't stay for dinner. You work 9-5 and go home to your family at night. Oh, and take advantage of the awesome health plan ($0/month HMO, or something like $25/month PPO), long maternity/paternity leave (it's something like 6 weeks of paid paternity leave, and several months of maternity leave), flexibility to schedule your time so you can make it to all of your kid's events, free shuttle so you don't waste all your time commuting, job stability, and relatively generous salaries.
This is a shoddy sales pitch, at best. Remember his first post as soon as he left Msft titled "Thanks Microsoft, Hello Google" (http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2009/11/thank...). I'm all for talking about your past work experience, but that particular post just costed Don his credibility.
Every time I think about Google, I remember Deepness in the sky/Vernor Vinge 's Emergent culture and how they were able to invent a brain device that created what they called Focus , device that induces an obsession with a single idea... of course the engineers are coming to Google voluntary, it's not like it enslaves them...
"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.
I would like to know how google compares with Apple rather than Microsoft. Apple is a different culture both from google and Microsoft yet it is a dynamic corporation that designs and markets new successful products efficiently and for profit. How does engineering culture in Apple differ from Google?
One of my coworkers has roommates that work at Apple. In his words (roughly, heard secondhand):
"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.
Interesting to note that he starts of with saying he wasn't at Microsoft in 1985 and then talks about a bunch of similarities between Google of now and Microsoft of 1985.
Read carefully. I said people who were there (at Microsoft) in 1985 told me about it, and there are striking similarities.
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.
Isn't having too many "engineering people" and too few "business people" the reason why Google hasn't come up with any compelling new products over the past five years, not couting the ones acquired by their "business people" (Android, Grand Central, Youtube, etc.)?
Isn't having good "business people" the reason why every Fortune 500 company pays huge license fees to Microsoft and not to Google?
But wasn't Microsoft's real success due to its business practices versus its technology? For example, it made key partnerships which they were able to leverage very effectively to gain market share.
Ok, I can definitely see that. On the other hand... if I weren't home for dinner, my daughter would wonder where 'dada' was.