starglows

They brought me there for a workshop.

You may have read about Google’s decor elsewhere, but I’ll describe it here for those who haven’t. Everything is colorful, fun, and funky. Projected onto the wall in the lobby are search queries currently being entered into Google. The lobby also contains the lava lamps shown here and a ball made of former visitor pass name tags. Just beyond the lobby, there is a giant whiteboard (made of 4 whiteboards put together) labeled “Google’s Master Plan.” It is a giant flowchart/graph that lots of people have written on. When I saw it, someone had written “Eliminate spam” and below it someone else had written “The meat first, then the ads.” In some places, the ceilings are unfinished, leaving exposed pipes and such. There are toys and polka dots on the carpet and scooters and beanbags and photographs taken by Google employees on the walls. There are doors that open to nothing. The toilets have heated seats, and they can clean you…I tried the “front cleaning” but it was too weird for me. Maybe you have to get used to it. I saw a ball pit in one building when on the tour of the complex. The conference rooms are named after cities; each building is associated with a country. Apparently the names given to the conference rooms correspond to the geographic location of the cities, so if you know the geography of the country for a building you should be able to find the conference rooms. The country for the main building is Africa.

I went to some talks given by employees while there. Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, presented “An Introduction to Google”. Some of the stories below were from her talk. She is very intelligent (for example, she studied CS at Stanford) and an engaging speaker. I would love to be able to keep a group of people fascinated like she can. She is cute (is it sexist to mention this? well maybe I would mention if I found any of the male engineers cute, but I didn’t :p). If it wasn’t for her endearingly dorky laugh, I might think she is some sort of superhuman being. :p

Another one of my favorite talks was one given by Joshua Bloch (when I saw his name in the program I realized he wrote Effective Java, a popular book that I’ve read before) and Neil Gafter. They presented snippets of Java code that had subtle issues so the output wasn’t what most people thought it would be. We had to try to figure out what the output actually would be, and vote on one of the multiple choice answers. They had a style where they took turns playing the role of the person who was trying to figure it out, and they good-naturedly made fun of each other. Then they went over the issues in the code and gave “morals” for future programming.

Here are some things I heard while there:

Someone else quoted Sergey on why the Google page is so simple: “We didn’t have a webmaster. I don’t do html.” At first, the homepage didn’t have buttons. Users just had to push enter after they typed their query.

A person emailed the Gmail team saying they had found a bug and they would tell them what it was in exchange for a Google interview or else they would tell the media. The Gmail team found it themselves. I asked “So he didn’t get his interview?” and the Gmail engineer I was talking to said “No, but I think we sent him a t-shirt.” He said that the person probably could have gotten an interview through other means if he could figure out that bug, but that he probably wouldn’t have been hired by Google because they take “culture fit” seriously and part of that is being nice—not the type of person who tries to blackmail others.

When performing the first ever user testing of the site, the users were instructed to go to www.google.com and try to find some info (I forget what exactly). The people running the test were confused when the users went to the site and then didn’t do anything for a while. At first they thought maybe the users were thinking of really good queries. After some time, the Google people intervened and asked why they weren’t searching. In perhaps one of the few times the sparse interface was a burden rather than a boon, the users said they were waiting for the rest of the page to load. After that, Google added the copyright statement so that people would realize the page was done loading. Also, one user didn’t believe Google was an actual company and asked “Are you from the psychology department?”

One engineer had to test the translation tools for the Google homepage, but she didn’t know any languages well enough to actually translate. So she used the Unix chef command to translate the required strings. Everyone at Google thought it was cool, so they convinced her to make it an option to use Google in Swedish Chef. Google currently gets about 350,000 hits a day on the homepage in Swedish Chef.

There have been a couple fires in data centers. An engineer said the slowness wasn’t always interpreted correctly at first: “You think it’s just a popular day, but really it’s a fire.”

When Marissa Mayer was a child, she was making a baseball field with the neighborhood kids, and they wanted to get it just right. They were arguing about whether some distance was supposed to be 88 or 90 feet. She said, “We were anal kids.” Finding out that information required getting one of their moms to take them to the library and looking it up there, whereas today you can find it in a few seconds using Google.

Some employees have done their taxes using only Google calculator.

Here is a response given to a question asked. Answers along these lines were a fairly popular response to certain types of questions. “There are two answers: 1. I don’t know. 2. I couldn’t tell you if I did.”

They have a free T-shirt cabinet. Every so often, it is announced that there are free T-shirts available. The employees come running to the cabinet and then they line up.

An engineering director (the engineering director?) said Sergey is fond of saying “If you don’t fail along the way, then you’re not trying enough things.”

One engineer in a panel had gotten her PhD and become a professor and then come to work for Google. Someone asked her what motivated her to become a professor and then what motivated her to leave for Google after all that work. She said that she thought she wanted to be a professor, so she got her PhD. Then she realized being a professor wasn’t for her, but she got tenure so people wouldn’t think she left because she couldn’t do it. She said that she should have just came to Google sooner and not have been so stubborn, but it seems to me like that is part of her personality so it’s not like she could have just as easily left.

Someone mentioned being less nervous during the interview because of a headache, so another engineer told us: “You might want to hit your head on the wall a few times before your interview.”

Google isn’t afraid to have big goals and take on projects that others think are impossible. They give workers freedom to work on the projects they find interesting—they allow engineers to spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want. How to make money is not the company’s primary concern. They are concerned with making great products that help people find and organize information and they know that if they accomplish that, enough money will follow. The work done at Google involves a host of exciting problems, where people really use stuff they’ve learned at school and through experience. When you’ve got an enormous number of users, using the most efficient algorithms really does matter. And speaking of all those users, Google employees know that their work impacts many. Google cares about design and simplicity. They give the analogy of a Swiss Army knife – if all the parts are open at once it is difficult, if not impossible, to use. It is best if all the features are there, but neatly stored for use when they are needed. Finally, Google has morals. Their motto is “Don’t be evil.” (Though I did have an interesting conversation with a recruiter about the motto not being “Do no evil” and the possibility of doing some evil without being evil.) It seems that they treat their employees very well (free food – gourmet meals, parties, buses to and from San Francisco, etc). I asked a couple engineers about their least favorite part of working for Google. They seemed to have to genuinely think about that to come up with answers…the answers I eventually got were: the commute, the Google 15, working with other teams that have very different ideas for a product, and not being able to comment publicly on Google much (in blogs and such). The first three seem not so bad or inevitable, and the fourth seems less cool, but I understand that they need to be secretive at times.

In conclusion, Google is awesome.

yay!!