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Google's Ten Golden Rules
selvan writes "Newsweek is running an article entitled Google's Ten Golden Rules. The article, by Eric Schmidt and Hal Varian, going into the philosophy behind the company." From the article: "Don't be evil. Much has been written about Google's slogan, but we really try to live by it, particularly in the ranks of management. As in every organization, people are passionate about their views. But nobody throws chairs at Google, unlike management practices used at some other well-known technology companies. We foster to create an atmosphere of tolerance and respect, not a company full of yes men."
I'd like to know how not being evil equates to Google censoring conservative websites from Google News. Again, it's like all the progressives I know, they're open and tolerant to other viewpoints so long as those viewpoints agree with their own. All other viewpoints must be evil because they do not agree...
What interested me was how they treat "knowledge workers".
Their principles can be summed up like this:
1. Pay them based on what they produce, not how many hours they're in the office.
2. Get out of their way whenever possible.
3. Keep them informed
4. Let teams make decisions, not some arrogant-but-stupid manager
I say that's the sort of thing that makes me want to work there.
Someday I would like to find the person who came up with this concept and shoot them in the head. I find nothing enhances my productivity more than having to listen to other people's meaningless personal phone conversations or conference calls that have nothing to do with what I'm working on, the assorted smells and sounds the human body makes that are not pleasant, the incesant pinging and chiming of IMs and email alerts, not to mention having my personal business available to anyone who wishes to stare over my shoulder.
Oh to have an office! And if I needed a co-worker's help and/or advice and they won't return emails/phone calls, I would simply get my butt out of my chair, go to their cubicle, grab them by the lapels (or goatee if there are no lapels) and tell them we need to have a little chat. There's nothing like the personal approach! And then I could return to my office, close the door, crank the Rush, and get back to doing what I'm supposed to be doing, which is coding.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I'm going to play Devil's Advocate for a second here.
I'll bet that most of us posting to this thread are doing so from single cubicles or (if we're lucky) offices. How many of us would do so from a shared cubicle?
If your cubemate is the kind of guy who'll accept you reading and posting to Slashdot, you're obviously getting along very well -- well enough to be very productive together.
If you're worried he'll rat you out to management for spending half the day on Slashdot -- or if he's the kind of guy who'll spend half his day downloading goat pr0n -- then sharing cubicles is a net win for you, him, and the company, because you've both got nothing else to do in each other's presence but work. (Or learn how to get along with each other and become as co-productive as the cubemates in the paragraph above this one.)
Some of the most productive days I've had have been days when teh Intarweb was down. There was nothing to do but work. And when the work was done, there was nothing to do but stuff I'd originally planned to do tomorrow. When tomorrow's work was done, there was nothing to do but think up new things to make my work life easier.
Combine the self-reinforcing mechanism of always having a peer looking over your shoulder, with Google's policy that 20% of everyone's time is supposed to be spent fiddling around on your own pet projects, and some very interesting things might happen.
Lots of what they are doing is in line with the Agile Work Axioms and agile practices. For example:
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
The "Don't be evil" motto sort of lost the lustre for me when I read about how they fired a new employee that was blogging about his "behind the scenes" Google experiences shortly after being hired.
Sure, it would be one thing if he was blatantly broadcasting private information (which a new employee probably shouldn't have access to anyway), but as far as I read, he was just kind of enthusiastically gushing about the behind the scenes operation of the great new job he had. Now it's entirely possible that we don't have the "full story", but...
I know if I had blundered similarly, my boss would've chewed me out a bit, but there's no possibility I'd ever even come close to losing my job over it...
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
This company is spooky in it's rate of innovation. Even, as the article points out, in it's management strategy as well.
Google, being the most popular search engine on the planet is privilege to the tiniest emerging trends, harvested by our searches. Our collective secrets. So they know quite a bit about what we want.
Rumors are that Google is considering Riya another spookily intelligent beta photo service that will probably put Flickr to shame while spark spin-off revolutions impossible to predict.
Oh, yeah, and aren't they supposed to come out with Google Calendar today?
Technology commoditizes everything and Google leverages IT extremely well.
Starting with the commoditization of information, Google's stated mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Perhaps next we will see the commoditization of the world's knowledge, followed by our collective intelligence.
I don't know if Google will be the entity to do that, but the trajectory seems clear to me with Google setting the pace.
I recently finished an article called: Technology, Computers and Innovation: Why Everything is Speeding Up exploring what's behind the accelerating rate of innovation in technology. Even though the rate of worldwide technological acceleration is astounding, it seems Google is still strides ahead. ~ted
Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence
Well, that's good, because you're the exact target audience of that article. I'm usually not that cynical but this is pretty blatant: is the message "Google is a doubleplusgood working environment" really _news_, or just a clever press hit and recruiting tool (as are the massages, chefs, yada yada. Ironic too that it's hosted on a Microsoft-owned news site, haha.)
:)
They need to do _something_ with those billions of dollars
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
Such a line of crap. "don't be evil" "tolerance"? "respect"? Kind of like the respect they have for the authors who have asked them not to scan their work, ya, they aren't evil at all. Ya its not evil just going ahead, ignoring the IP creators, just because "you know what's best for them" or to make some money. Yep, they aren't evil at all.
Seriously the media loves google and that is the only reason the stock is so inflated. If we didn't know better you'd think they weren't the one with site traffic behind aol, yahoo, and msn, by ten of millions of visitors. Its similar to apple, by all the good press and constant front page articles you'd think they'd have more then a few percentage points of the desktop market, but nope.
This at the end of the day is why all the predictions that Microsoft is going to fail "the next time around" never come true. Why that crowd is always dumbfounded that MS does so well time and time again. At some point you have to stop believing your won FUD and Fluff pieces and try to get the facts.
Google's stock is going to cr4ash like the dot.com bubble. The only question is whether or not YOU will get your money out before or after it tanks.
That's why we're saying that Google is no longer "Do No Evil", but "make MORE money".
If Google wants to compete internationally, Google will have the pleasure to deal with governments who condone torture, condone political, religious, and ethnic repression. Google will have to deal with organized crime and government official corruption.
I know people in the oil industry. They don't claim not to be evil. They do claim (and they do) to get a lot of money for their shareholders.
And let me tell you about shareholders: They don't give a flying fuck if your company is responsible for child labor in third world countries or for polluting on a mass scale, or for propping up despotic governments. As long as the dividends keep coming in.
Don't like it? Tough. That's the way the world works.
"Piter, too, is dead."
Google more popular than jesus.
I found this rule very interesting. I interviewed at Google this year, and went all the way through their long interview process which lasted almost two months. And for the record I turned down a job with the GMail team. I actually interviewed at several large software shops this year, and on one hand Google is not all that different. They take things to a bit of an extreme though and I actually think this will hurt them in the long run.
All companies have programmers interview with lots of people, both from the team they will be working on and usually manager/director types from other teams. Google really goes overboard on this. You will probably interview with every engineer on the team you will work on, and quite possibly an entire other team as well. I'm sure I met with 30+ people there. Early on everybody tries to test your knowledge and skills. After the first two rounds, they pretty much stop that and it becomes much more about culture. That's where the problems start. You see, when you have 30+ people all concentrate on your personality/cultural-fit, and everyone of those 30 have a veto, you wind up with a lot of uniformity. I would say that Google had the least diversity in terms of personality types of any company I've seen, and I saw more people at Google than anywhere else. They definitely have their own monoculture. Now that monoculture has a set of values that are decidedly different than typical corporate or even typical big software company values, hence the golden rules. I think it will be their downfall though.
But everyone loses sight of the fact that the end goal of all these enticements is simply to get you to stay at work. That's it.
But on the other hand, the way they get you to stay at work is by making you genuinely want to stay at work because it's enjoyable. I really don't think that's evil--if it works, you are happy; if it doesn't then you don't have incentive to stay later than your work requires, and you go home.
I work at one of the companies in your list, and I know people in both camps, and I haven't seen any negative repercussions for the people who don't spend their leisure time at work. They still get their work done, and management recognizes and respects that. Mileage may vary from group to group or company to company of course, but that's certainly the way it is all around me.
Because Google exists in a capitalist environment.
Remember, capitalism is the economic system that's based on greed. It is the opposite of socialism, which is based on responsability and generosity. Guess which one worked out best?
Capitalism is also pretty resistant to other negative human traits, like laziness. A lazy entity in a capitalist environment will soon be left out in the cold...
Don't kid yourselves, rules 1-10 AREN'T what brought google it's huge piles of cash. And now that they're publicly traded, I won't bet on the rules' longetivity. Ben & Jerry's also had some very nice rules of work. They ended up being bought by Unilever, the anti-thesis of their rules of work. Do you think they still follow all their rules?
Google is succesful, thus they can afford these rules, it's not the other way around.
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
I'm just saying I can relax better in my own space.
Fair enough, and so can I. My question is, how much of this is habituation with what is actually a second-rate work process?
I mean, what if "only works well alone and in silence" is an evolutionary dead-end? What if, in the long run, people who become habituated to working in physical proximity to each other, and companies that become adept at building teams that enhance each team member's cognition under those conditions, will be more productive and more successful?
All the colloborative software in the world is no substitute for regular human contact. Rather, it inserts several layers of indirection and buffering where direct contact may actually be more desireable.
Like I said, I don't doubt you work better in private. but what if this is actually a bad habit, rather than a good one? Google seems to be attributing the value of its employee contributions in part to their assumption that it's a bad habit. Given the success of Google employee contributions, I'm willing to take wait-and-see approach.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.