Right now I am on a plane returning from Mountain View, California where a Rockfish colleague and I have spent the last two days in training at Google’s home base. I thought it would be nice to take a few minutes to let you know what it was like and possibly confirm or dispel some of the myths regarding Googleville that you may have heard.
| The employees, called Googlers, are very friendly…almost too friendly. When they are having a good day they like to call it feeling Googley. They call new employees Nooglers and make them wear beanies to ensure everyone knows they are new to the company! Sensing a pattern here? They have found a variation of the word Google for almost everything. There is even an engineer whose official title is “Jolly Good Fellow”. They have multiple campuses in Mountain View and we had the pleasure of training in their primary office on day one. This building was not built buy Google but it was given a Google facelift. They are very adamant when you are in the buildings that you are accompanied by a Googler. They do not allow pictures to be taken inside but as you can see we broke that rule but only in the lobby. The office spaces are pretty cool but not Uber sweet. Everything from the stone and hard wood floors to the walls and furniture are lightly colored giving it a bright and cheery atmosphere. There was no evident pattern for offices or cube layouts. Some people were crammed three to an office and others had very spacious cubicles. The coolest things about the offices are the portable conference rooms. Yes I said it, portable conference rooms. They are made of very light canvas-like material and had plastic for the windows. |
Food! Food! Food! Three meals a day are provided FREE OF CHARGE in a full service cafeteria. The main office has the largest of the cafeterias with seven different varieties of cuisine available for you to choose from. I discovered the definition of crazy and that is 4000 software geeks turned loose for a free lunch. They also have a rule that there must be a micro kitchen (coffee, snacks, juices, etc.) every 300 feet and it is all free! The only things that Googlers have to pay for are the unhealthy snacks like chips and cookies. You have to get these out of vending machine that bases its price on fat content. The Famous Amos cookies were $4.55. Dana and Kenny…don’t get any ideas!!!
 | A few of the other amenities are the on-site Laundromat, dry cleaner, post office, and they even have a mobile haircut van that visits once a week. This place is definitely set up to accommodate the engineers and programmers that have dedicated their life to the company. The only thing they don’t have is a place for people to nap outside of the massage chairs that are located in every lobby on the campus. In one of the lobbies on the main campus we saw the very first Google server. It was a makeshift rack that had somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 jerry-rigged servers all crammed in separated by a layer of cork board. I guess you have to start somewhere. As far as workstations go there was a combination of darn near every computer on the planet. I saw a lot of PC and Mac laptops throughout the offices as well as the Linux desktops that are the preferred machine for engineers. |
One of the coolest rules at Google is the 20% rule. This means that you can work on whatever you want 20% of the week, basically 1 day out of the week. Some of the cooler programs and initiatives on campus have come from people utilizing the time. For instance, there are numerous shuttle buses running between each campus in Mountain View. One of there developers wanted Wi-Fi on each bus so that is what he did. There was a program written that is supposed to simulate a robot dream. This program created numerous morphing images that never recreates the same image twice. Not very practical but it was awesome to see.
Well there is a lot more I could tell you but I think you get the point. Google is a place where the culture is like no other, the people are like no other, and the technology is definitely like no other. They should be an inspiration of what can happen when you get the right people focused on a goal and this trip was definitely one I won’t soon forget.