Title : What makes Google such a great place to work?
Link : What makes Google such a great place to work?
What makes Google such a great place to work?
As those of you who know me through other media or in real life are aware by now, I'm starting a job at Google (again!) after just over a year at IBM Research.
So, why am I going back? I'm reminded of the bit at the start of Steve Yegge's infamous rant about Google and platforms (the original blog post is down, but has been kept up elsewhere for posterity). Just before tearing apart Google's platform strategy, Steve softened the blow by saying this:
One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.(Steve Yegge, in case you were interested, writes very amusing yet intelligent rants about interesting topics )
So anyway, does IBM do everything wrong? I'm not going to answer that, partly because I don't feel qualified to do so. The company is going strong 101 years and counting, so there must be plenty of 'right' in there. What I can say is that, in my experience, Google does everything better. Not just better than IBM, but better full stop. If you look across the whole world of large corporations, I can't imagine that there are many that make a better environment than Google for a software developer. Google's awesomeness as a place to work breeds a certain sense of complacency and whiney entitlement on the inside that is best cured by spending a bit of time at a normal company. I always had a pretty good time there, but did perhaps spend a little too much time fixating on how the vegetarian options at lunch left something to be desired rather than delighting in all the awesomeness around me. Seeing how other places function (and I'm confident that IBM is not an unusual environment in any way) has definitely sharpened my perspective about what made Google so good.
Having dodged the negative question, being the sort of positive dude that I am I will now list some of the things that personally I have missed the most about Google during my absence from the company. This is going to be done over two posts. Today I'm going to cover the tools, the culture and the management. Friday I'll come back to discuss Google's immense scope, its great people, and (of course) the ridiculous perks. Some disclaimers:
- These are all generalisations and exceptions exist.
- My perceptions are coloured by my specific experience as a software developer, on particular projects, in particular offices.
- In none of this do I represent Google (or IBM, for that matter). These are my personal opinions only.
Anyway, let's get on with it.
The tools
I'm not sure what it says about me, but I often find myself profoundly affected by mundane matters of infrastructure. When asked I liked best about Zurich, I had to swallow my shame and say "the public transport". And this wasn't because I disliked Zurich! There were heaps of things that I liked, but somehow the infrastructure seemed to be the single thing that mattered most. Good infrastructure reduces the friction of living one's life, and makes nearly everything you do more pleasurable. Living in Australia after Zurich made me realise how inadequate the transportation infrastructure is here. And so it was with surprise but also a hint of recognition that the first things I started missing about Google were not all the glamorous things but its truly incredible tools, infrastructure and support.On my first day at IBM, I had to grapple with Lotus Notes (an experience as unpleasant as everybody said it would be). On the second day, I discovered that we had no version control repository set up in the lab and that if we wanted one, we would have to set up and administer it ourselves. Within a couple of weeks I learnt that our tools were going to be no better than the best open source tools that we could administer ourselves, and often quite a bit worse. Want version control? Set up svn. Want to store some data? Set up db2. Want to run a mapreduce? Set up Hadoop. Want your data backup? Set up and administer a backup system. Want to run Tomcat? Perhaps you should consider IBM Websphere Application Server instead. And by the way, install it yourself. Did you say you used svn? You should have gone with IBM Rational Team Concert. And so on.
People talked about "the cloud" nonstop, but collaborated on documents by emailing .doc files around and manually merging changes. IBM owns a Class A IP allocation, but I kept running out of IP addresses to asign to new servers. Bureaucratic tools were Java applets if we were lucky, or Lotus Notes "databases" if we weren't. Technical support was nonexistent, but technical bureaucracy was rampant. Didn't like something about a piece of IBM software? Good luck finding a place to provide feedback.
Anyway, I said I wasn't going to rant about IBM. Oh well, too late now. My point is this: I didn't have to worry about any of this shit at Google. My email was Gmail, we collaborated by using Google Docs. Our intranet was fast and reasonably searchable. There were amazing globally-administered revision control and build tools. Great testing and release infrastructure. If I wanted to start a mapreduce, I hit 'enter'. Internal bureaucratic tools were all web apps, and all tolerable or actively good. Internal applications all had quick feedback links or queues in the ticketing system. Whole teams provided me with services for data storage, compute, load balancing, and many other things. SRE's did an incredible job keeping software up and running. Tech Stop were always there to quickly and competently solve any computer or networking problems I had.
I didn't really notice any of this stuff, precisely because good tools and infrastrucure reduce friction. Once the tools disappeared, I felt that most of my work life was friction.
The things I complained about then ("I can't believe my 10,000-worker mapreduce took 25 minutes to start!") seem ridiculous now.
The culture
There are a lot of things to love about Google's culture, from its sense of fun to its sense of adventure to its open communications, but I'd like to focus on one in particular: its intolerance to bullshit. Google has a culture of intellectual honesty that focuses on what's right and what makes sense, rather than what sounds good. Things that do not go over well at Google: hiding behind titles or qualifications; grandstanding to make accomplishments seem more significant than they are; using vague jargon and industry buzzwords to cover an absence of real meaning ("the enterprise faces a tipping point in big data and must embrace advanced cloud technologies and end-to-end real time analytics").At Google, expect everything to be challenged. If your meaning is not clear, you will be asked to clarify it. If you're making a mountain out of a molehill, you will be cut down to size. And if you're talking a load of bollocks, you will be called out on it. Even if you're a Director. Due to their intolerance of bullshit, Googlers can be perceived as blunt or rude, but I perceive it as awesome. It's amazing the amount of difference a cultural intolerance to bullshit can make. It's like some sort of solvent that stops inefficiency and waste from building up in all the nooks and crannies of the organisation. Strategies are questioned and therefore improved. Dead weight does not make it into management. Pointless bureaucracy is squashed. The reality of the company's business and its own perception and projection of its business are kept in much closer sync when bullshit is eliminated. Trust grows, and politics shrinks. Good people don't leave in frustration.
I've learned that I have a very low personal tolerance for the posturing and politics of bullshit. Therefore, I will value Google's low-bullshit culture even more this time around.
The management
I know that a lot of people think that the quality of management doesn't make much difference to a work environment, but I think otherwise. There are always bad apples, but on the whole Google has an effective and responsive management organisation that is dedicated to helping individuals and teams achieve their goals (and I'm not just saying this because I used to be one of them!). Clear communications are valued, and problems taken seriously. Leadership is by example, not by authority. If a team is unproductive for any reason, the manager of that team sees it as their problem to help improve the situation. Technical managers are drawn from the technical ranks, so they are never clueless PHB's and usually have their teams' respect.
Part of what enables this excellent management culture are the frequent opportunities people have to provide feedback on and to their managers about their performance. This helps keep managers accountable up the line, but more importantly provides valuable input that helps them do their job better. As a manager, I often felt that people wouldn't tell me directly if they felt I wasn't doing a good job on something. The existence of various forms of structured and often anonymous feedback gave me great insight into what I needed to to better. Likewise, I made sure to always put thought into how I could provide valuable feedback to my own managers.
In summary: managers were less like "the boss" and more like a part of the team whose job it was to make sure you were happy and productive.
UPDATE: The second half of this article is now live. Click here to continue through to it.
UPDATE: The second half of this article is now live. Click here to continue through to it.
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