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Internal Microsoft Email about Life at Google
An anonymous reader wrote in to give us "An interesting perspective on Google, from an internal email sent around Microsoft. Basically an interview that provides analysis about how Google compares to Microsoft from an employee perspective. Included are suggestions for what Microsoft might copy in order to stay competitive in the job market and criticisms of Google's "college kid" atmosphere."
"These kids don't have a life yet so they spend all of their time at work."
:)
"People are generally in the building between 10am and about 6pm every day, but nearly everyone is on e-mail 24/7 and most people spend most of their evenings working from home."
Wow - I dunno about the rest of the world, but for our company that's the norm and we're all in our 30s/40s working for a marketing company
The biggest difference between Google and Microsoft is that Google turns research ideas into products. Microsoft spends something like five billion dollars on research a year, and pretty much any conference has a few interesting papers by Microsoft Research, but five years later you still won't see any products based on them. Google have a good track record of turning employees '20% time' into products. I think the difference here is that Microsoft have a research arm, and a products arm, and are not good at passing ideas between the two, while Google have people doing product work 80% of the time and research 20% of the time, so there is no disconnect.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"Microsoft is an amazingly transparent company. Google is not. "
Ya, right.
I find that very amusing. Bill gates ran Microsoft as just such a company for many years.
I heard, that over at google, they have vat grown clones of Natalie Portman for use by all employee's. How is Microsoft ever going to counter that?
My guess is with an army of brain dead Steve Balmers...
... that google abhors private offices and loves open-space plans, was the moment any temptation to go work for them evaporated for me. Now if only there was a company like MS (work-environment wise) that worked in the unix-linux-lamp-python-etc space...
-- the cake is a lie
FUD is also blaming Microsoft of FUD at the drop of a hat...
At the risk of getting marked troll or flamebait, it almost sounds like a pseudo communism. There are bins for them to have shirts, and free food... Google takes care of everything for them. Throw in the "you are all alike" attitude, especially evinced by the random desks and overcrowding.
Since most of this sounds a bit non-standard with companies, it will be interesting to see how well it ends up working in the long run.
"if only i had known i would have been a locksmith." -albert einstein
Would the last person to leave Redmond for Mountain View please remember to turn off the lights.
Now, you say "oh, but patents 'only' last 20 years". Well, I've got news for you: US diplomats have been pushing for 40 year patent terms abroad (asia, mainly). Once a country goes for that, then the USA will have a policy-laundered excuse to "harmonize" up to 40 years. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The entire patent system should be abolished - if you want to reward "innovators" over and above the free market, find a way that doesn't deal a death of a thousand cuts to the freedom of hundreds of millions.
Somehow, the author interprets the great perks like free T-shirts, meals, health care, and facilities as Google playing your parent and running your life. That's a hell of a spin job on what I'd consider a dream environment.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I'm amazed to see discussions, not just here but elsewhere, based on blog posts which supposedly give "an insider's look" or "confessions from a former...." and are taken as the gospel truth.
Admittedly, I am cynical, but isn't it common sense to take these things as false until proven true?
Personally, I give this kind of thing as much credence as forwarded-forwarded-forwarded email.
I think another big issue is that Google is probably still at that stage where projects are new enough and the organization is new enough where you're actually permitted to accomplish significant things without a mountain of bureaucracy, a long series of pointless meetings, and approval from several large committees. You get the impression that, unlike other software companies, Google hires good people and lets them work instead of keeping them perpetually frustrated.
Eventually, Google's employees will be as over-managed as most other employees at most other software companies.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
#1 Tip for MS employees: tell people you work at Google.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I've tried to write code in a cubicle, and it sucks, big time. I can share an office, but two-up in a 10x20 is about my limit.
So, if I find myself competing with Google for a candidate, I can see the main lever to apply. Besides matching their salaries, I've got to provide a private office, and make sure that the work is as interesting as whatever they'd be doing at Google.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I blogged about my own experience at Googleplex in Mountain View. I concur that Google is very hush hush in general. My most surprising observation was that the security guards were rather laid-back while some engineers were very solemn and confrontational. This is not indicative of the overall feel of the place though - it's like a cruise ship party where people do work.
Google is about making a better, quicker, more effective product or filling a need that wasn't filled before. Microsoft's policy has typically been "How do we control the market?" "How do we make this product necessary to the industry?" etc... Not building a better/quicker product but making a product in demand. Kind of like requiring vista to run certain games(while my railroad tycoon 3 causes vista to coredump on my laptop, I'm not touching it on my desktop, which means no shadowrun... damnit).
You can argue it any way you like, Microsoft is a little more agressive in the industry and Google believes if you build a great product people will come(and with their name they believe everything they do is a great product whether it is or isn't because they get people just because of their name). Microsoft has given up on better/quicker and gone for "How to make this necessary?"
What amazing spin:
Microsoft is an amazingly transparent company.
People know about M$ because M$ has misbehaved not because M$ wants people to know things. M$ leaks like a sieve because their employees hate their company. This is how the rest of the world gets Halloween Documents, and other fun outside of lawsuits. Lawsuits are the result of everyone else's outrage and reveal even more. Calling that kind of hate and animosity "transparency" is a brazen lie. Actual disclosure will get you fired.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You may not like the few Microsoft products that you actually know about, but the idea that Google produce more products that hit the marketplace is simply fundamentally not true. Furthermore, while Microsoft's products may lack the "innovation" you're after, at least they have some that actually attempt to do useful things. Google, on the other hand, is focused on ways to monetize the Web through advertising. Very noble...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I guess that's the downside that Microsoft sees in Googles "college kid" atmosphere. Why innovate when you can embrace, extend, extinguish.
Wow. I'm self employed so I pay for all my lunches anyways, but I wouldn't work somewhere where they make you pay for food in the cafeteria unless they give you 1 1/2 hrs for lunch. Sounds like my corporate brothers are having a shitty time right now. :(
I'd say even with the less pay Google offers a better working environment, although career wise it sounds like Microsoft is the way to go(coming from a Microsoft memo, that's the way you would expect it to sound too).
I guess it's hard to demand stuff from the "corporate overlords" but crappy food for $15 isn't going to win me over. They say that I say 1 1/2 hrs for lunch so I have time to get out and get back. I love the ideas of a "tech stop" at google. That sounds just awesome.
hmmm... a while back there was speculation that Microsoft had despaired of ever having its press releases taken seriously, and instead had started to release company PR disguised as "leaks" about which it would then pretend to get vary annoyed.
By doing so, instead of everyone going "ho-hum - more PR from Redmond" they'd take the leaked document very seriously. Then someone would pipe up with, "you know, if you think about it, Microsoft really don't sound too that bad in this", and everyone would take that seriously too. Because, you know, if it wasn't true, why would they be so angry?
So I suppose it's possible that Microsoft employees aren't the intended audience here...
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
The memo is wrong about private office space. Microsofties are used to it because they all have private offices (with doors and all), which is far better than cubes, but his dismissal of shared working spaces comes with no backup arguments (other than a link to a JoelOnSoftware article that talks about them expanding space--how is that a backup argument?)
I used to work in a team room environment, where all the developers sat together in one room (there were 10-15 of us or so), working on the same product. I loved working in that environment. You could talk to anyone just like that right away. Not having to walk for a minute or half a minute makes quite a difference, believe it or not. Since the barrier for asking someone for help or ideas is so low (lean over and speak), it's much easier to quickly bounce off ideas without having to interrupt your own flow. Also, you overhear others' problems and ideas, and pitch in with your own. Countless times I've heard someone lamenting some problem and was able to chip in with "oh I just solved the same issue."
Yes, you must have headphones in the team room, because sometimes you just need to concentrate and headphones are essential to drown out the noise.
Unfortunately, I am back to working in a cube and I miss the team room days.
I work at Google. It really is a dream job. The main criticisms he had were:
1. People work too hard
2. There is little privacy
#2 is true and is unfortunate, although it matters less than you think because nobody expects you to be working all the time. #1 is just a load of crap. Some people work hard because they feel like it, but there is very little pressure to do so, and many people do not work hard at all. I average less than 8 hours a day and never work from home, and I have never been given crap about it.
As many have pointed out, many successful companies have started off similarly.
So is Google doomed? Doomed to be a bureaucratic mess with 800 levels between me and, say, Bill Gates with the only people who can really profit off of my work being closer to the top of the pyramid. I've interned a lot of places, but haven't actually had a job. Friends who have tell me such horror stories. Are the creme of the crop CS people destined to either pinball around the tech companies as the are founded and inevitably turn crappy hoping that once they'll get in early enough to ride the wave for the rest of their lives? Or is there a better way? :)
...that there are so many replies along the lines of
"Dude you shouldn't have published this, why do you even work for microsoft."
and
"You should quit right away"
and
"this is horrible, man you ARE the reason microsoft is suffering!"
and
"What is wrong with you? Why would you publish this? This is internal only"
and
"I cannot believe you posted this. What is wrong with you? Makes me shudder to think what else your pathetic and bereft character would allow yourself to post"
and
"Idiot, idiot, you should quit. You should be ashamed. Hopefully HR will figure out who the hell you are and can your ***."
When I read the posting, my thought was that both Microsoft and Google sounded like interesting places to work, with different profiles of plusses and minuses.
When I read the responses, my thought was that Microsoft must be as full of paranoid conformists as the second circle of Hell. If these responses are typical of the environment, goodness knows what Microsoft does to people who post Dilbert cartoons on their office walls.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Just wait another 5 years and Google will be the new evil empire, they are almost already there with all of the privacy concerns.
I thought it was a pretty interesting read, definately not FUD. I don't fear working for Google now, or am I any more uncertain or doubtful about the experience. The article jives pretty well with other stuff posted about working for Google. So basically I think you are wrong. Calling the article FUD does increase uncertainty and doubt about its content. Maybe not fear, so it's UD then.
This type of knee-jerk Microsoft bashing is only good for a little karma-whoring but does not really add anything of much value. Kind of like FUD. Especially when you would have posted the same comment no matter what the article said.
a bunch of people who will work slavishly churning out a whole lot of crap they think is the most awesome thing ever.
Yep. I bet they've never had to do any maintenance at google. Everything they have is brand new (and admittedly, all of it is pretty awesome). The problem is that, take something like gmail for example. Gmail *has* to exist and be supported and updated and maintained for decades. What I'm getting at is, if you look at the big picture, you'll see that 90% of the time spent coding on gmail will necessarily be spent maintaining it, NOT writing it.
Now, I don't know what the code for gmail looks like. Maybe it's beautifully written, pretty-printed, commented, documented, poetry. Maybe. For the people who do that 90% of the work, I hope it's like that. What I have seen in my years in the software industry, is that people who can churn out lots of code and do lots of cool stuff, tend to write code that's very difficult to maintain.
So anyway yeah, like you said, college kids will work slavishly to churn something out. I just hope the code is readable because if not, google is going to pay for it in the long run.
I spent time working up my resume to get noticed at Google or Microsoft to get a job. I really wanted to work in a field that was 'techie' and that I was working for a company I believed in.
Then I got a job at a video game company. It was a smaller firm, but a lot of fun to work at. People were all young (I'm only 26), they had free food and lots of perks. You could go to work in shorts and a tshirt.
But then I started to see the down sides of it all. I worked long hours, and often worked from home. My health insurance wasn't anything special. Being on email till the wee hours of the night was an annoyance.
And then I found another job, and left.
Now I work for a place I have no real feeling of accomplishment, nor is it a place I yearned to work for. But I get in at 10am, I am out the door at the latest by 6pm. I don't work from home. I don't get on email after I leave work. Emergencies come up and then I take care of them, but I am able to separate my work life from my personal life with great distinction. My co-workers are in their 30s and 40s and 50s, all of them have families and leave on time to make sure that they are home to pick up their kids, play with them, and be at their soccer games. They encourage me to leave work and go out on a date, watch a movie, read a book, and do something constructive. They know that working isn't the point of life, but merely a part of it.
And now at the age of 26, I finally have a job that I yearned for, but didn't know I wanted.
Do yourselves a favor -- find a job that will let you live your life reasonably. You will be better at your job because you appreciate it, not because you are dying for it.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Where did you get that out of the memo? Many companies ask for more from their employees, with NO perks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I strictly work 7.75 hours per day mon-fri; no blackberry, no work at home, no email checking at home. Heck no work contact at home at all. This is EXACTLY how I want it - my family is much more important to me.
Now they are not supposed to have a life. Techies didnt have a life in college. They need to get their kicks in sometime. Retirement is a nono as with all the soda few will live to see retirement
**Life is too short to be serious**
Do you really think you will find privacy in Mr. Gates' empire? You could work in a vault, but every file on your computer, every email, phone call, and web site you visit will be monitored. You might even get fired for making a blog post at home that Mr. Gates did not like.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Google creates cool stuff :)
Microsoft tries to, fails, buys it and ruins it
The criticisms of Google's "college kid" atmosphere remind me of the apple "flashback" ad from the "get a mac" campaign where PC is always calculating how much time Mac is wasting doing "fun" things like creating something in iPhoto. iLife really does imitate art I suppose.
So we all have to conduct our lives the way you want us to? Whatever happened to "different strokes for different folks?"
If someone likes working all the time, why not respect that and move on with your life?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
You're forgetting the vast majority of the receiving end of Microsoft's R&D dollars: it's development, not only research.
Didn't we learn from all the EU probing that Microsoft begins a project by coding, not by engineering, design, and documentation?
I'd bet the vast majority of Microsoft's development dollars go into iterative coding - i.e., code, compile, fix errors, rinse and repeat...
OK - maybe I'm being a little harsh, and Microsoft has grown up over the years, but when they were young, that was exactly how things worked.
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
I work for the last tech generation's great and most favorite company. A big three letter place. It's a tomb. It's a company that sees its future as merely saving and cost cutting its way to prosperity as it develops nothing and creates nothing. And the only new things to come out of it anymore is via acquisition.
MS is probably just like that. A husk on cruise control that's driven by costs, bureaucracy and slack. A place where nothing new happens because the executives are paranoid rich blockheads.
Some MS insider should check to see what the average tenure with the company is now. I'm sure its dropping. If it's a really low number like mine is then that's a red flag for a company that just wants to operate on the lowest cost basis, probably out of the country and where innovation and quality are already dead.
More than 24/7, with substandard salaries and an slavetrader management mentality? Not any company I've ever worked at.
I bet when MS is born, it looked like what Google looks like know. Wait another 5-10 years (or until next big thing) and Google will be an old and (possibly) evil company for many.
Notice that the M$ guy never mentioned "do no evil" as a factor.
The fact that this was a non-factor in the discussion perhaps indicates that this MS->Google->MS employee really is working where he belongs.
(Yes, I know that Google hasn't perfectly observed its "do no evil" rule, but it still seems a heck of a lot better than M$ in this regard.)
A bean bag chair and paint? Oh yeah, that will make the next version of IE better. Perhaps they can be a company that does not make you grovel, beg and feel like a school girl to get anything done. Nah, that would be a different company - here's a M$ bean bag, which is ergonomic like an oversized sack..
The whole article is one of the most infantile and petty cases of corporate penis envy I've ever seen.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
google is successful.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'd go a step further than that. I'd guess a lot of good ideas at Microsoft are thrown by the wayside not because communication is bad, but because the ideas are "dangerous." The company's massive revenue comes mostly from Office and Windows; many things that are new, shiny and have the potential to change the world, also have the potential to change the OS and productivity markets. The Web's history at Microsoft is the core example of this way of thinking - if Microsoft can control something and prevent it from being too world-changing, it's all right. Hence Fake-Java, IE, ActiveX and so on. If it weren't for the company's paranoia of upsetting the cash cows, Microsoft would probably have changed the world a dozen times over. They might have better supported Java, built Web versions of Office, opened more APIs in Windows, spearheaded the OpenDocument format and adopted it in Word ... and I'm sure there are thousands of other "what-ifs" that the cash cows have killed.
Google doesn't seem to care what they tear down in order to build new technologies, aside from their ad revenue, but at the moment that's not in serious danger.
What makes the open plan office thing tolerable at Google is a very large number of modest-sized, well-equipped conference rooms.
Google does go overboard on on-site services designed to keep people at work. I'm surprised they didn't go all the way and build dorms. Some large Japanese companies do that. But the real feel of Google is "overfunded dot-com". Yes, they're profitable. But the profitable part, search, was built some time ago. Most of the technical people in Mountain View are working on Google's money-losing sidelines, like desktop apps. Those are the labor-intensive parts of the business.
Remember that Google is really an ad agency. That's how the money is made. Much of their newer hiring is sales reps for ads. The days when the ad sales just ran on autopilot are over; now Google has to push their ad products. In time, the ad agency people may take over. That will be an interesting culture change.
Google's campus used to be SGI's campus. Most Google buildings are former SGI buildings. So if you've been in the Valley for a while, there's always that reminder that a company can go from #1 to zero in just a few years.
Compare Intel in Santa Clara. Intel looks like Dilbertland. Intel is where cubicle culture began. Intel has built buildings from the ground up with single rooms covering about two acres, full of tiny cubicles. The cubicles are so small that only one chair will physically fit in them; they look like library study carrels. These aren't for call center employees; these are the people who design Intel CPUs.
You give Google a little too much credit there. For example, the 'Google Pack', Google Groups and Picasa certainly weren't innovative, they're acquired products. As a regular user of the last two, I can't see that Google have done much at all with them.
In the case of Google Groups, they've recently made it worse, by trying to combine public newsgroups with their own 'groups' in the interface. There was nothing wrong with how it was, but I presume Google wanted more control over it than the public newsgroups alone allowed.
Is that a natural law or just the result of bad management?
Let's see what Google looks like in another ten to fifteen years. I'm guessing they will be no more innovative than Microsoft is now.
http://www.bynarystudio.com
Why innovate when you can embrace, extend, extinguish.
...and that's why Google invented the search engine.
I agree with the rest of your post except for the above sentence. In the case of Google Apps, I don't see how the product is better, quicker, more effective, or filling a need. Despite how much people here hate MS, Office really is an excellent product for businesses and Google Apps doesn't even scratch the surface of the functionality. It's a nice proof-of-concept for "hey, we can build a spreadsheet engine using javascript", but I don't see it being useful for anyone accustomed to using more than the most-basic of Excel functionality.
It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Do you really think you will find privacy in Mr. Gates' empire? You could work in a vault, but every file on your computer, every email, phone call, and web site you visit will be monitored. Why do you have to make me sound like a broken record? *exasperated sigh* Proof, please? You might even get fired for making a blog post at home that Mr. Gates did not like. As usual you're misrepresenting that situation. Work at any big company. They will fire you for taking photographs of private company matters. It's called 'corporate espionage' and it's not in any sense of the word 'protected' by any law. It doesn't matter what he was doing, whether he was taking photos of computers, trousers or whatever. He fucked up big time and you won't find a single company of Microsofts size that will tolerate that behaviour from their staff.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Also, I don't use the phone or do any work on Saturdays or religious holidays, which my non-jewish coworkers have all respected. People don't expect me to be available when I'm not at work. Add in a fairly sizable commute, and home and work stay pretty separate. With young kids, I really enjoy that.
I'm the number two guy at the company, after the founder, so it doesn't seem to have had an adverse impact on my career.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
True that. I forget about their other stuff. I really mean gmail, google news(it's absolutely great), and google search. The rest is really lacking. I don't care for Office as Open Office does everything I need and I don't use the other apps unless I'm somewhere without either, but they are only good for looking at docs.
Sorry Nick, you're making us all look bad :)
I don't work for Google, so maybe they wouldn't appreciate Che either.
Even better, the guy that story is about actually admitted that he was in the wrong and was fired 'with cause'.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Like most Microsoft "internal emails" that are "leaked", likely as not this is thinly disguised Microsoft PR. As far as I can tell it's a collection of mostly true facts with very very heavy Microsoft spin on them.
Well it's not like this was an internal Microsoft e-mail from the VP telling its employees not to work at Google. However, regardless of whom the e-mail was from, if you have to resort to saying "Don't work for XYZ because they suck..." instead of saying "Work for us, we're great! Here are the reasons why..." then there are issues that need to be worked out within the company.
Personally, I'd rather have people pick my company to work for because it's a great company and not because the competition is labeled as being worse.
Best "String" Ever!
Lots of google's projects are a success. Google Maps and GMail increases page loads which increases revenue. The value of that mind share alone is.. well, you've seen Google's stock. What you're concerned about is that Google only has one way of effectively monetizing their products (through advertising fees). Well I would argue that this is not an inherently better or worse way of monetizing products than vendor sales.
Let's face it, television and cable channels have no way of monetizing their products except through commercials (season DVDs aside). Those are industries which seem to be doing pretty well.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
You mean "what Microsoft might innovate!"
-- Boycott Shell
Here's an idea for us older types with families...I think IT companies would have fewer retention problems if they balanced this "take care of everything" approach with some reasonable limits.
Here's an example: Most parents would love the idea of on-site daycare for their kids. It's the 2000s, and many women actually want to keep working after they have kids. Making the whole childcare thing easier would definitely keep good, more experienced workers in place and productive.
The problems come when this extra stuff is provided with the understanding that you will work tons of extra hours for it. The college campus atmosphere works for younger workers, but most older ones with families want a balance.
In your 20s, especially in the IT world, you don't have a whole lot of outside commitments. You can go to work, then go home to an empty apartment. This doesn't fly once you get married and you're expected to put time in outside of the office. This is another reason why Big 5 consulting is so attractive to the young. A job where you get to travel, drink in strange places, and make a lot of money is a really easy sell for a new grad.
I think companies (especially software/hardware/services houses) would be really surprised how much a few extra "grown up" perks add to productivity. If I have to make one less trip a day because something's provided, that's more time I can be contributing. One of these things would be an enclosed work space...cube life is annoying especially when you have loud neighbors.
aptly named suv4x4, looses his cool and tries to act like a dick:
I'm not going to see four instances of "M$" in a single line of text and stand here taking it like a pussy. I'm coming for ya! Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!
It was two lines, and whatever you tossed relieved only yourself.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I currently work at Google, and people aren't expected to work overtime, they choose to. Keep in mind the types of people Google hires - very intelligent overachievers. These are the types of people who want to keep working after they go home.
If you don't want to, like me, you can put in your 40 hours a week and be done with it. I work my 8 hours a day and that's that. Nobody asks or expects me to do more.
In fact, even the founders actively encourage people to have a better work-life balance. They've come out and specifically said that if we feel pressured to work overtime then something is wrong.
Actually, the issue isn't that there's a disconnect between the research and products arm at Microsoft. The problem is that the products arm won't start on a project unless it's "worth their time." Given the amount of overhead a typical product requires, it's going to have to sell a lot of copies or be very strategic to get underway. Most of the ideas that come out of R&D are cool, but too small to matter to MSFT.
I don't have first hand experience with them, but Google doesn't really seem to care about that. They release projects on the merits of the project, not the numbers the sales staff can generate.
What MSFT needs is something akin to Daimler's old Plymouth division. A risk-taking company that doesn't expect large sales numbers. I remember a presentation from a couple MSFT researchers back in 1994 on something pretty similar to what Second Life has become. The tech wasn't there to make it happen properly at the time, but it's something that could have been in that subsidiary's backlog of ideas. It just got lost within MSFT.
True, but you extrapolated based on your own experience when you wrote "The whole programmers need an office cubicle thing is vastly overrated." I agree with you that interesting work is *very* important to productivity, but don't underestimate the noise factor. Plenty of people (perhaps the majority) are able to tune out moderate noise but I'm unable to do it myself. I can't even listen to music, the primary method that people use to tune out noise in cubicle envrionments.
It's been really rough for me personally. Over the past 7 years I've been working in cubes, and I estimate that my output has been 1/4 of what I could have produced in an office with a door (which I enjoyed at a prior job). The more demanding the work, the smaller this fraction becomes. Fortunately in my job I am able to hide the fact that I have unproductive days on account of noise, but it's no fun struggling with it all of the time. When deadlines loom I have to come in on weekends to finish my work in peace and quiet.
One more thing: earplugs work great for short periods of time, but if you wear them for more than a few hours they really make your ears ache. They're not a viable solution for more than a couple of hours a day. Noise cancelling headphones don't work either. They eliminate the HVAC hum but leave the voices loud and clear (with the pair I tried). If anybody has found headphones that do a good job cancelling out voices, please let me know.
What exactly doesnt google buy nowadays?
Google maps, google earth, picassa, google goups, youtube, ect, all were just bought and relabled the microsoft way.
Give it another 2-3 years, and original developments at google will have gone the way of the dodo. As they all will have much better use of their time (like searching for ways to put those venture capital billions to some use).
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
So, Microsoft is trying every single (quite pathetic I have to say) thing to avoid employee leaking to competitors or better places, including having developers in their own private office?
With team members probably not communicating with anything else than e-mail, no wonder why they can't make a single product without crashing all the others.
Tons of perks at the cost of a social life, I'd say!!!
The OP asks a very interesting question. To me, the article reads like a helpful list of the pros and cons for working for two different places. Both come across as reasonable places to work (for those of us with "high pressure" type jobs), although they each have their own foibles.
In short, I see nothing objectionable in this article; nothing evidencing a Machiavelian attempt to "stick it to" either side. Corporate confidentiality is certainly something I appreciate in my business; but it would never extend to such items as perks or office size or any of the other items.
I found the discussion of the "20 % time" particularly interesting because it matches how most law firms treat pro bono hours. Sure, you're entitled to do pro bono -- we even give your "billable hour credit" for pro bono work -- but make sure that not one iota of your existing workload suffers.
I agree with what you're saying for the most part, but I, too, have worked in both types of environments. You've captured the downsides of the start-up type company pretty accurately. The downside of the other type of environment is a tendency toward under-achieving.
... i.e. big HMOs, university staffs ... any job where it's really difficult to get fired or laid off once you're in. These jobs attract people who have families, outside lives, want the healthcare and the work/life balance, precisely because they offer so much security.
... and the buck stops there. Your manager diddles the numbers a bit. Everybody's told they need to "work a little harder." And that's it.
You see it more in larger companies, and especially as companies get closer and closer to government
The problem is, once you have a preponderance of people with that mindset on staff, it becomes difficult to act like the smaller company. When your whole staff is seeking security in their employment, it makes sense that the organization naturally becomes more and more risk-averse. You stop taking chances. There's nobody to rock the boat.
When that really starts to suck is when upper management starts looking at the numbers and they say, "Hey, it's a different market, your department isn't pulling its weight anymore. We need change." In a company full of ambitious over-achievers who have learned to be just a little bit afraid for their jobs, this situation is an opportunity. It's time for new ideas to surface, for the underdog to make his bid for success. New projects get launched. People move offices, start reporting to different bosses. You try stuff.
In a staid, safe, secure work environment, however, this is how it happens: Upper management says "we need change," and the head of your department says, "Yes sir, will do, sir"
And maybe you were at the same meeting that the head of your department was, and maybe you heard that upper management guy saying "we need change," and now you're just sitting there. Twiddling your thumbs. Waiting for the axe to fall. And you go to your boss and you say, "Shouldn't we really be doing this or that?" But he's thinking about his kid's braces and his car payment and his wife's last biopsy, and he doesn't want to rock the boat. So he sends you back to your desk. To wait.
Bitter much? Nah, not me.
Breakfast served all day!
I once shared an office with one other developer, a good friend of mine. We told stupid jokes and laughed all day long. I thought it was a cool compromise.
Breakfast served all day!
I don't have first hand experience with them, but Google doesn't really seem to care about that. They release projects on the merits of the project, not the numbers the sales staff can generate.
Which is why, realistically, Google is a two-trick pony - the search engine and AdWords.
The rest of their stuff, while kind of neat at times, doesn't really matter. Add to that the fact that most of their recent "developments" have been aquisitions, and they start to look a lot less impressive.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Microsoft "given up" on beter/quicker? Microsoft is/has been a lot of things, but innovation isn't one of them. They are far more successful at letting someone else identify a profitable niche (WordPerfect, Lotus Notes, dBase, Novell, cc:Mail, windowed UI, Netscape, RealPlayer, Apache...) and then dominating it by any means necessary. I'm not even sure better/quicker applies.
As for Google... meh. A commodity search engine and some amusing toys that I download once and never use again. I don't really think of them as a products company, just a services company that is (unsuccessfuly so far) trying to enter the products space. If they were to disappear tomorrow, I'd pick another search engine off the list and not think twice about it. They certainly aren't a company I think of as "making a better, quicker, more effective product" or even "filling a need". But that's just my opinion. They are certainly getting some good press and people seem to be raving about them as if they matter... but beyond the search engine, I just don't see it, myself.
When I worked at Microsoft, all full time employees usually got their own office. If you are a vendor or a temp, then you will share it with 1 or 2 other vendors/temps in your group based on the size of the office. If you are a tester for games, then you will more than likely be in a large testing room with 20 others.
And as for getting fired for making blog posts/comments that the CEO/President or whatnot does not like, its basically like that in most companies. Even more so when the company is a large corporation.
I think you mis-spelled "compulsory" there.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
I think it is already happening. If you go to, for example, Google's Sydney office, there are way more ad reps working there than programmers. The same for the Melbourne or NZ offices, where they simply don't have any technical people.
"Please provide any additional information that you believe will help in our battle for talent against Google?"
Here are some suggestions:
- stop trying to win in the market through sleazy business practices
- stop trying to kill open source through FUD; either deliver something that's obviously paying money for, or join open source
- stop delivering products many years late
- stop having your executives perform monkey dances (and fire any that have the bad taste to do it)
- fire the old-timer multi-zillionaires; they make any newcomer feel like a peasant, and they have far too much influence
- stop filing patents on inventions others have made decades earlier
- start making products that matter, as opposed to useless variants of outdated products and "me too" versions of Google and Apple products
Personally, I don't give a damn whether I work in a cubicle or a private office, or whether my company gives me free food or not, but I do care whether I have to be embarrassed mentioning who I'm working for.
Finally, scientific confirmation that hatred makes you stupid.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Having no clue about how to grow your career sucks. having an HR department that tries to micromanage your career on a 4 month bases sucks too. The fact that Google has 100 employees per manager, projects span groups with no relevance to who you actually work with, etc makes it easy to see how people could get lost. Not everyone has the 'go-getter' personality, or even the 'speak up occasionally' personality necessary to advance themselves in that kind of a place, but they shouldn't be penalized becuase their manager never bothers to talk with them.
I'm not sure why you think a Che poster would be frowned on, it has nothing to do with whether or not you are given a free bean-bag chair... You don't expect free Che posters to be given out do you? When companies give out free posters they tend to be marketing crap or those super lame 'motivational' posters.
I have plenty of friends who've interned at Google (though I haven't myself yet), and so I have a good idea of what working at Google is like. One of my friends is a very academically passionate guy. He's at work on average 12-15hrs per day (He's at work until 5am on many occasions). He doesn't always "work" per se of course. He goes to the gym or plays one of the other recreational activities there. He goes to research seminars and does independent (but related) research to his job. I guess it's a part of his 20% independent time. I've visited the Google campus (Googleplex I guess they call it), and it's fabulous. It has a unique university feel to it. Plenty of lounges and open seating areas. People just sit around doing work wherever with their feet up and some Naked juice (ohh how I love the Naked juice). Yes, Google cares about where your degree is from, but Stanford is not the only school they hire from by any means. The University of Waterloo (where I'm from) in Canada has the #1 co-op program in the world and so Google hires plenty of interns from there (many of whom become full time employees presumably). I can't make any claims about the Microsoft life style though because I only have one close friend working there, and I haven't been to the Redmond campus yet (though I may be going up for a visit in a few weeks). So yes, the young eager ones do not have a social life, but you're free to be as academic and research oriented as you want to be. If you think you have a brilliant idea, the company gives you the flexibility to explore the idea. There are plenty of young inventors out there with ideas that never make it commercially because they weren't willing to take the chance to start up a company and their employer didn't give them the time to explore it. At Google, you have that time, and I've heard if you come up with an idea that ultimately is released, they'll reward you handsomely making starting up a company less appealing.
"Just hire everyone who walks in the door, and expect to fire most of them in a few months? "
I've worked for two companies where that has seemed to be the case. More accurately their hiring interviews were so cursory that they could not really tell who would fit in. So after three months it was bye-bye to about 20% of new employees.
I completely agree; Microsoft Research is far more likely to produce high quality papers containing interesting and novel research. The problem is, they don't then do anything with it. If I wanted to do research that was then ignored by everyone, then I'd stay in academia. It seems such a huge waste of resources for Microsoft to spend so much developing such great ideas without ever moving them into products.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
the guy there talking about left MS his company was brought by google doesnt it say somthing that hes now leaving to go back to MS ?
You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim
Jeez, I don't wanna work that hard.
From what I read on Wikipedia Google salaries are on the low side. I work as a sysadmin for the federal government - I don't carry a corporate cell phone, work 40 hours a week (16 of those from home) in an environment where working overtime is strongly discouraged because of budget cuts and I make more than twice what Google's entry-level sysadmin does - and live in a considerably lower-cost area than the Bay Area.
I don't get free food but do get a free gym, 10 federal holidays, 13 sick days and 26 vacation days a year - on top of the 104 personal days I already get - and I go home at 3pm every single day. I don't understand why someone would want to work in that kind of a sweatshop. For me, a job is necessary to be able to do the fun stuff - not my reason for existence.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
http://scobleizer.com/2007/03/20/one-thing-microso ft-does-way-better-than-google-research/#comment-3 00364
http://scobleizer.com/2007/03/20/one-thing-microso ft-does-way-better-than-google-research/#comment-3 00607
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
This idea comes in two forms: One out of ten work days, each employee can take that day to do volunteer work. The other model is 1/10th of a company's output is given away. Plan A Examples - Joe Bob spends every other Friday teaching inner city kids how to use computers. The Canard Noir cooks for free for 8 hrs every other Tuesday. Everybody at Big Boys Heating and Plumbing does a Habitat for Humanity project every other Monday. Gold Gym in Herndon could run a bi-weekly fitness day camp for fat kids. Lisa Anne saves up his 10% over a few months and then spends two weeks to teach an art class. Plan B Examples - Every tenth copy of Vista off the line goes to a charity pile for schools, shelters and the poor. Every tenth pint of blood donated is frozen and shipped off to where it is needed. Allow companies to write off the "losses" and to tout how much good they do. THE POINT - To move away from MONEY. It is far more meaningful and helpful to have people donate time and sweat. Plus, unlike writing a check to an orphanage, volunteer WORK creates a sense of community and responsibility, fosters a real human connection. /worries this might be modded "Funny"
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
As Google's employees grow up and exploit their perks, the perks will disappear. A few years will pass before Google's culture is comparable to Microsoft's. I'm surprised they've been able to maintain it for this long though.
I've been at Google a month now, and I am finding it very satisfying,
even more so than I hoped for. A great deal of the corporate culture
is simply about removing barriers that might keep you from doing your
work. The Tech Stops are a perfect example of that - if you have a
problem, they usually just fix it right then and there.
Before I joined up, I assumed that the meals were basically a strategy
to extract the most hours of work from employees. Now that I'm here,
I'm finding that it doesn't feel like "work late and we'll feed you"
at all. Rather, it's an opportunity to get to know people better, make
friends, build and strengthen those connections. And range and depth
of talent of the people is truly incredible.
There's a lot more to the food than it being free, too. It's not just
that it's "gourmet" either. Amazingly, the people who make and serve
the food are as passionate about it as the engineers are about
software. There's a garden inside the main campus where they grow
veggies, and they use local sources as much as possible. Today, for a
snack I had strawberries that were every bit as good as the wild ones
I picked from patches when I was a boy. Turns out, they were grown
right next to where the barista in my building's coffee bar lives.
Earlier this week, there was pizza for the open source tech talk, and
the guy who made it brought it himself, and chatted with the guests.
That kind of quality and connection is something that I think
everybody should aspire to in their lives, in food and in other areas.
I can see that not everybody would have a good experience working for
Google, especially people who need their hand held all the time, or
who have difficulty balancing the demands of work, life, family, etc.
I personally like being treated like a grown-up, and appreciate being
able to treat other people the same. But the culture there probably
isn't for everybody.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs