Ahead of the Curve (31 page)

“You must be kidding,” I said, staring at the car.

“Our normal SUV has some problems, so we’re having to use the wedding limo.” A piece of cardboard was flapping from the roof. “Sorry about this. The sunroof’s broken.” I clambered in the back. A row of dirty scotch glasses clattered in a rack as I closed the door. I couldn’t believe it. I was going to interview at a company that prided itself on being egalitarian and unshowy, where the employees dressed in T-shirts and flip-flops, where the company motto was “Don’t Be Evil,” and here I was showing up like Dr. Dre at the Vibe awards.

Google’s headquarters, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, was a sprawling glass-and-metal complex originally built for Netscape, a former Internet titan that had been steamrolled by Microsoft. It sat in the middle of nowhere in particular, hemmed in by roads and freeways. The buildings curved and swerved around open-air volleyball courts and trees. Linking them were walkways that rose and fell gently from the ground as if lifted by a breath of wind. It felt like a college campus or the headquarters of a progressive church. Through every window you could see someone working, many staring at two screens simultaneously. The people were eclectic, from long-haired Viking look-alikes and surfer dudes to buttoned-down white men in striped shirts and khakis, all carrying their ThinkPads under their arms. But first I had to get in. The white limo passed security and tried to negotiate a small, tight traffic circle. Behind us waited a line of humble Toyotas and Hondas, each containing a Google zillionaire. As we pulled to a halt, I heard a crunch from the front bumper. The driver backed up. Crunch again, this time from the side. He nudged forward, then backward again. I could see the sweat pearling on his forehead when he turned to try looking out the rear window.

“Let’s try this again,” he said.
Sccrrunch.
“We may be just a little bit stuck here.”

“I’ve got to get out,” I said, gathering up my things. I tried opening one door, but it was jammed. I pushed open the other door and ran up a flight of steps away from the limo, just as two security guards approached to assess the developing crisis. I glanced back briefly to see the traffic into the Googleplex stretching all the way down a street lined with palm trees. I ducked into Building 42. Above the receptionist a screen showed a real-time selection of search requests made by Google users: lawnmowers, tennis, Bush, anal, Omaha steaks. I grabbed one of the free fruit juices stacked in a refrigerator by the door and plunked myself down on a purple sofa to recover and get my head right. Eventually I was shown to a small, windowless meeting room painted pale gray, with just enough room for a round table and two chairs. This would be my home for the day. I wedged my bags and myself into one corner and waited.

It was 10:00 A.M. and my schedule was full until 5:30—seven interviews in a row, with a break for lunch. The first one began with the usual questions. Why Google? Why business school? Why marketing? Yes, why exactly marketing?

Lots of people at business school had very precise ideas of the kind of function they wanted to pursue. When I turned up at HBS, I did not even know what a business “function” was, let alone which one suited me best. Was I a finance person, or more suitable for marketing, or product management, or strategy? I hadn’t a clue. During long discussions on the Spangler sofas, I had learned that product managers at technology companies needed to speak at least two, and possibly three, languages. They needed to talk to software engineers and understand their peculiar whims and desires. But they also needed to talk to users and consumers and understand what they wanted. Somewhere in the middle, they had to talk business and make money from their product. The main challenge in this job was communication. You had to persuade engineers, whose characters tend naturally to the perfectionist and obsessive, that at some point they must tailor their work not to some technical ideal but to actual consumer wants. At the same time you had to help educate consumers and develop a business model.

At companies like Google there were fleets of gleaming MBAs all product-managing like crazy. A few managed entire products, such as Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, or AdWords, its advertising service to businesses. But most served on product management teams, where they managed tiny pieces of a product and spent a lot of time e-mailing one another. Lurking below the product managers were the product marketing managers. At a company like Procter and Gamble, which made commodity products such as toothpaste and toilet paper, marketing was king. You were never going to distinguish your toilet paper from a competitor’s on functionality alone. It was all about the brand and the way you marketed it. The most senior managers at P&G tended to rise through marketing and sales, and it is what drove the business. At Google, marketing was treated as an afterthought. The marketers fought fires as they arose, tried to offer some customer feedback and ideas for launching new products. But the department was mostly ignored and understaffed. Engineering was where the action was. It was understandable. Google grew to be a multibillion-dollar company without spending a dime on advertising. The excellence of its search product spoke for itself. Such success was a computer scientist’s fantasy. Build a wonderful product and people use it in droves. No need for the fluff and hype of advertising. These were deeply practical people who loved things that worked, hated things that didn’t, and were not going to be swayed by a twenty-foot-high billboard telling them a brand of underpants would make them more attractive to women.

The problem was that as Google’s success attracted envy and competition, it had to engage in marketing. It could no longer hide out in Mountain View making billions and ignoring the world. As it built its business in China, stored personal data in the United States, and took on industries ranging from book publishing to telecommunications, it prompted suspicion and accumulated enemies. Still, this did not mean the company had to like marketing. One woman in my section turned down a marketing job at Google because she said she would be standing on the other side of the fence from the rest of the company just waiting for them to toss over a sack load of products when they were ready for release. Marketing would never be part of how Google developed products. The department was just there to keep the various freaks and misfits who populated the engineering department from ever having to deal with the world. As far as I was concerned, as a Google marketing manager, you got paid, were issued some of that precious stock, and got ignored by some geeks. It could be worse. I told my interviewers that Google had a serious public image problem waiting to explode, much as Microsoft’s had, and that it needed good communicators like me to help defuse the bomb. I said I was a keen Google user, which I was, and that I believed Book Search was a thrilling concept, which I did. As each interview progressed, we tried out some big, hairy goals. So, if you like photo-sharing, what would you like to be able to do that you can’t do now? How would you launch that feature? How would you get ten million people using it in six weeks? How would you get print publishers to use Google as a medium for getting advertisers? What exactly would you do? What kind of events would you organize? So you would invite all these publishers to Silicon Valley and then what? As a journalist, what article would you most like to write about Google? Is it evil not to disclose our cut of advertising revenue to our publishing partners? It was all rather like business school, the persistent search for answers and action plans as well as analysis.

My interviewers were uniformly nice. There was a woman in her twenties who had joined the company as an administrator well before the IPO and had risen up. I suspected she had made an awful lot of money, as she didn’t seem to much care about whether product marketing worked. There was a man in his late thirties who rushed in from the gym, still sweating and gulping from a water bottle. He had been in sales all his career and talked quickly and nervously. He asked me to explain the network effect of Google’s business, how more users meant more advertisers meant more users meant more advertisers, and so on and so on, to incalculable profits and overwhelming market share. There was a woman who had been handling the marketing for Book Search over the past few months, when publishers and authors had turned on it. “I told them we had a problem, but they didn’t believe me until it appeared in
The Wall Street Journal,
” she said, but she didn’t seem too concerned.

In between interviews, I would go to a nearby snack area, stuff my pockets with free malt balls and yogurt-dipped pretzels, and throw back a large espresso. By the end of the day, my breath must have stunk like Satan’s bowels.

A number of people had told me that the fizz had gone out of Google since the initial public offering had made everyone so rich. I certainly got that feeling. Apart from the sales guy, there was none of the oomph I had been expecting. Perhaps it was just a California thing. Maybe the software engineers are so brilliant that the rest of the company can just ride their coattails. Or maybe I was just shocked that really, honestly, they weren’t evil.

I emerged into the fading sunset, my mind drained of every scrap of technology knowledge it had ever contained. The white limousine was waiting for me on the street, a scratch down its side. The driver started to edge into the parking lot, but I waved him back, running across the traffic circle where we had been wedged nine hours earlier. I yanked open the door and hurled myself into the backseat, arms out in front of me like Superman, hoping no one saw me. Later that night, I was delayed in Las Vegas airport. From 11:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M., I waited in a departure lounge, beneath the ten-foot-wide cleavage on a strip club poster. Across the hall was the crowded smoking area, full of desperate-looking souls. All around me were the foot soldiers of American business: men in raincoats fidgeting with their cell phones, glancing up at the boarding announcements for the flight that would take them home or off to yet another hotel room with yet more pornography on demand. They were like ghouls, haunting me whenever I wavered, urging me not to go corporate, not to give up my life to travel schedules and airports and sales meetings and bad food and a paunch and boasts about frequent flier programs, scratching at my face and mewling diabolically into my ears: Don’t do it!

Three weeks later, in mid-March, I heard from Google again. They liked me, but could I do one more interview on the telephone? We had already been at this for two months. How could a tenth interview hurt? I took the call in one of the HBS study rooms overlooking the warehouses and depots that stretch out behind the school. The sky was an Etch A Sketch of skidding, bursting clouds, with lightning bolts in the distance. Above me a fluorescent light flickered before dying halfway into the interview, leaving me talking in darkness. My future now lay in the hands of a voice three thousand miles away, a calm, friendly voice but still just a voice. At the end of the interview, she told me I should hear back within a week or ten days.

After two weeks, I e-mailed my recruiting manager and heard nothing back. After three weeks I called. Nothing. I called two more times. Nothing. “Call them until you get an answer,” said a friend Google had already hired. I sent an e-mail to all four of the recruiting managers I had dealt with. Finally, a month after my final interview, three months after I first applied, I received a call. The job had been filled, but I was being put back into the general pool. Would I be interested in working as a product manager for technical solutions? In Mountain View?

With my pride now dragging along the ground, I approached an HBS graduate at Google and asked what I could do. She arranged another round of interviews for me, this time in New York. In sales. “Sales is where it’s at,” she told me. It’s where the money gets made. So off I went to Manhattan for my eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth interviews. There were the familiar lava lamps and play areas, the Foosball tables and refrigerators full of fruit juice. There was the same assortment of people I had seen in Silicon Valley, chatting on the iron stairways, leaning into one another’s cubicles. But this time, I felt queasy the moment I arrived. I knew I was in the wrong place.

“We’ve got a big funnel of people trying to work here, and only a few get through,” one of the sales managers explained. “What makes you think you can?” My interviewers had been in sales their entire careers. When I asked one of them how he had reached his present position, he started drawing a diagram, writing out his list of jobs and then linking them with arrows and boxes. “I’ve done really hard-core sales,” he said forbiddingly as he scanned my résumé. “Have you?” I could scarcely bring up the
Truck Driver’s Handbook
from all those years ago. As I gave my answers, I could feel the case I had made to myself that I could work at a place like Google collapsing, destroyed by reality. I could no more do sales at a technology firm than I could scale the north face of the Eiger.

By the time I got home to Boston that night, I decided I was going to quit before I was pushed. I e-mailed Google and told them that after four months of interviews, I no longer wished to continue. They told me they were sorry and that I could always come back. But I wanted the company expunged from my life. I wanted to scrub away the mask I had worn for them all these months. I uninstalled all the Google features on my computer and made Yahoo! my default search engine. I took the thick folder of notes and articles I had assembled on the company and tossed them in the bin. My HBS job search had reached its sticky end. I had played the game atrociously. Margret came through with a beer.

“How did it feel?” she asked.

“Wonderful.”

An unexamined life is not worth living.

—SOCRATES,399 BC

Living an examined life sucks.