The Google Guys (7 page)

That employee describes the work environment as a “velvet prison,” where the perks and friendly atmosphere are offset by the pressure to work insane hours. “Twelve hours a day, six days a week was typical,” he says. “It was optional, but there was pressure to do it. They fed you all the time, so there was no reason to leave for food. Google was a twenty-four/seven lifestyle. And they were all such nice people.”

Larry and Sergey used another technique to make sure they would get people who were as close to clones of themselves as possible. Their favorite place for recruiting in the early days of Google was their former stomping ground, Stanford University. Says Jennifer Widom, a computer science and electrical engineering professor at Stanford: “For the first three and a half years [after Google's founding], everybody who graduated under a faculty adviser in the database group either stayed in academia or went to work at Google. We used to joke that if Google went under, all our grads would be unemployed. Everybody says it's ridiculous how many Stanford alums are at Google.”

For example, in 2002 Larry and Sergey hired Orkut Büyükkökten to continue his Stanford work on search technology for hand-held devices. (In his spare time he pursued another pet project from Stanford and created Orkut, now the most popular social networking site in Brazil.)

Glen Jeh, another Stanford grad student in computer science, came up with a way to personalize searches to an individual's preferences, an idea he wrote up in a paper, “Scaling Personalized Web Search.” In June 2003 he started a company called Kaltix to exploit that technology—some Stanford folks think the company was created just to be bought by Google. Which it was, three months later.

Most of the original work culture continues at Google today. Googlers enjoy subsidized day care centers, free meals, free laundry rooms, kiosks to drop off clothes for dry cleaning (employees have to pay for that service), and almost uncountable other perks. There are Google bikes parked throughout the GooglePlex that employees can hop on and ride from building to building. None of them is locked; employees simply take them when they need them. Some people bring Segway scooters, roller skates, or skateboards to work. A doctor regularly visits the Google campus so Googlers don't have to leave the office for a checkup.

And, of course, Google is known for its “20 percent time,” the one day a week that employees can take simply to work on something that really interests them. They may start a new project, join one already under way, or put together their own teams. It's an irresistible draw, although some engineers say that these days it's actually hard to take the time to do it anymore.

Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and the lead person on engineering hiring, explains the mandate, set primarily by Larry: “The important thing to understand is what the value proposition is of everything you do,” he says. “Say we didn't have any cafés on campus. Then thousands of people leave at eleven thirty to beat the rush at restaurants. So you ask what's the value of those two hours, what interaction can you get if people are able to stay on campus instead? And if you're going to provide food on campus, what's the difference in price between bad food and good food? The delta is relatively small.”

Larry and Sergey are also experimenting with new types of perks appropriate to a much larger company. A recent
Fortune
magazine interview with the pair noted: “They're tinkering with Google's 401(k) plan and making sure it's easier for employees to get financial advice. They're studying the effect of wealth on happiness, trying to understand what it takes to keep rich folks actively interested in their jobs—and making a contribution to the company. Page says he traces his interest in benevolence to employees to the rotten time his grandfather had of it working in an auto plant in Flint, Michigan, in the days of sit-down strikes back in the 1930s.”
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Adds Sergey: “I don't think we should be looking back to our golden years in the garage. The goal is to improve as we grow, and we certainly have more resources to bring to bear on the cultural issues and whatnot as we gain scale.”
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Larry and Sergey show no reluctance to experiment with unusual ideas. They have created a management system virtually void of any set hierarchy, with very few levels of management before reaching the top. People change jobs frequently, and for a time, project managers would shift jobs every few months in order to learn all the necessary ropes. Today they last about eighteen months at one job. Below the project manager level, people are constantly switching jobs. Engineers might be seen working at any time of the day or night, but mostly at night.

The company is also obsessive about having very small groups working on projects. Five or six people are generally sufficient to handle a major project—such as Google's book search initiative (more on this in chapter 9).

The interview process at Google is infamously brutal. Interviews are done not just with prospective managers, but with people in many different disciplines and management levels across the company. In engineering, Google has hundreds of hiring committees that meet one hour a week to discuss prospective hires. This system is designed to remove any biases from a particular manager conducting the interviews.

At the end of the process, after interviewees are winnowed down to the best, Larry steps in. “Larry still looks at every hire in engineering,” says Eustace. He starts with written summaries of the candidate from the hiring committees, and “he'll poke at the ones he thinks he should look at. The fact that we review everyone means that nobody puts one over on us.”

Larry's interviews are more likely to be an exchange of ideas rather than a question-and-answer session. In Eustace's case, when he interviewed with Larry in 2002, “he talked about in so many words organizing the world's information, how important it was, why it's an interesting technology challenge, and why search technology wasn't yet finished. We talked about the kinds of challenges that the company faced, about the company doing something that mattered.”

The hiring process is necessarily constantly reevaluated as Google grows. “We don't really know that the way we hire at Google is optimal, and we're trying to improve it all the time,” says Page. “We obviously hire a lot of smart people. We also hire people who have different kinds of skills, and we hire people who work on computers, and do construction, and many, many other things.”
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Most important, the engineers they hire must have and be able to present a lot of information about a particular problem. Larry and Sergey like to run the company based on data. They pride themselves on taking a very disciplined, scientific approach to solving problems. “Their view is that information is the basis for almost all the decisions anybody makes,” says Eustace. “The more information you can get, the more credible the information is, the more likely you are to make a good decision.”

To that end, Google keeps a database of everything everyone is working on and sends out regular e-mails to keep others in the company updated. Employees—primarily engineers—are not only allowed to see what's in the works, they're also allowed to critique the updates (sometimes not very politely) and suggest changes. It's like a small town with a giant electronic network and too many computers. Everybody knows everybody else's business.

Eustace also explains the standard Larry and Sergey set. “The key element we're trying to find is smart people, productive people, people with a slight disdain for the impossible, people who have good leadership skills and who we find interesting. We try to avoid people that have incredibly large egos that are inconsistent with their abilities or are not good at working in teams.”

The result of this craziness is that Sergey and Larry have managed to hire top people away from start-ups and established companies alike—including Microsoft. Says AltaVista founder Louis Monier, “They've accumulated an amazing intellectual capital. For several years, when things were tough, they'd come down and get the absolute best people. They have the most amazing assortment of brains in Silicon Valley today. My old friends from [AltaVista's] research labs are there. They've just totally drained the swamp, in a good way. They have a pool of talent that is simply scary.”

Many others in Silicon Valley see the brain drain in less favorable terms. Says one venture capitalist: “Google is sucking the oxygen out of the ecosystem for everyone else.”

Most of Google's new recruits come straight out of college or grad school. This is a trick that Bill Gates also used to build Microsoft. By hiring bright young grads, the company gets a strong intellectual base of employees who will work for low wages, accepting stock options instead, and have the willingness and stamina to work long hours. Generally having never had a job before, they are indoctrinated into the corporate culture. The company becomes their life. “The dirty secret of Silicon Valley,” says one venture capitalist, “is that start-ups are run by single young people who can work all night. Google is recruiting only young people. The EEOC aside, it does seem to work.”

Still, it's certain that the policy of hiring young people with strong academic cred has caused Google to pass up some very good talent. Geoff Yang, a VC with Redpoint Ventures, recalls a friend of his who interviewed at Google. He was in his midthirties and was highly experienced in online business as the head of Coca-Cola's interactive business. He went through fifteen interviews, and was finally asked to supply his SAT scores and college transcripts. He didn't get the job.

Larry and Sergey tend to discount the value of experience in hiring a new employee. After all, they didn't have any experience. Also, people with experience at other companies are not as likely to break the mold, to adapt to Google's unusual management style. Too much “context” for a problem, says Eustace, “can also stifle innovation. If you know too much about what's going on, you come up with twenty-seven reasons why this is hard.”

That attitude can cause problems. In 2004, a fifty-four-year-old director of engineering named Brian Reid filed a lawsuit against Google, claiming he was fired from the company because of age discrimination. Reid, a former engineer from AltaVista, said he was told he was being fired because he wasn't “compatible” with the company's corporate culture. The lawsuit noted that Google's workforce had an average age under thirty and that fewer than 2 percent of employees were over forty. That case is still crawling its way through the courts. After being tossed out, a California state appeals court reinstated it in October 2007. The California Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in the future.

Until recently, few people left Google. Now that many have collected their stock options, some are bailing out, often to start their own companies. Being used to Google's culture, they can be difficult to work with. Says one venture capitalist who is now working with ten former Googlers starting their own company (all of them in their twenties): “They're young and brash. They think they can do anything, that they're infallible. They want investors to leave them alone. Which we don't do.”

Not everything is happiness and light at Google. As with any other company, there are the usual good managers and bad. When one online publication wrote about Google cutting back on perks, several anonymous people claiming to be Google employees or former employees wrote in with their own complaints—most of them with vitriol. One said that the famous 20 percent time is a joke, since their regular jobs consume so much time that they can't possibly pursue anything else. Another wrote about managers who never take on a task unless it will get them publicity.

Google's hiring practices and corporate culture have caused other problems over the years. For one, Google is something of a two-class culture. “Sergey and Larry are kind of contemptuous of non-tech people,” says one former employee. “They're nice people, though they didn't always know how to be nice.”

Some non-tech employees complain that they feel like second-class Googlers. They usually work in outlying buildings on the corporate campus, away from the central buzz that surrounds the founders and top management. The scientists and engineers, along with top management, get most of the stock options.

Still, some non-techies accept that it's just part of life at Google. Sarah Bauer, for example, was an English and creative writing major at Stanford before joining Google's advertising group in August 2007.

She sees nothing wrong with the engineers' getting special treatment. “The engineers are around longer. They're five or ten years older. Google just demands such higher talent from them. It would be a little strange to treat me the same way, to have the same benefits.”

As Google grows, some of its Pharaonic benefits are starting to shrink. For one thing, Larry and Sergey were too ambitious and naïve about how free they could be with the company's money. They thought that the lavish treatment could go on forever, no matter how large the company grew. In the prospectus for Google's initial public stock offering, after outlining some of the freebies the company offered, Larry and Sergey warned prospective investors: “Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time.”

They have not been able to keep their word. They even used to offer $5,000 to employees who bought hybrid vehicles—the vehicle of choice for both Larry and Sergey—but ended the practice after deciding that the hybrid market had enough momentum on its own.