Pleasing Google's Tech-Savvy Staff

An anonymous reader writes "Douglas Merrill, Google Inc.'s chief information officer, is charged with answering that question. His job is to give Google workers the technology they need, and to keep them safe — without imposing too many restrictions on how they do their job. So the 37-year-old has taken an unorthodox approach. Unlike many IT departments that try to control the technology their workers use, Mr. Merrill's group lets Google employees download software on their own, choose between several types of computers and operating systems, and use internal software built by the company's engineers. Lately, he has also spent time evangelizing to outside clients about Google's own enterprise-software products — such as Google Apps, an enterprise version of Google's Web-based services including e-mail, word processing and a calendar."

Comments

Re:NO TFA

[Coraon]

...I was looking for pictures...I'm in lust with the google building.

Re:I wish our IT was like this.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in finance/IT and I'd just like to say: *all* large financial companies are like the one described by pongo000.

Why not switch to a company like google ?
Simple: they pay me so much money that this form of light torture / kafkaesque work environment is still more attractive to me. The banks I work for pay me approx 4 times more than google would - this way, I can retire when I'm 40 years old (and spend time doing interesting/creative IT stuff instead of having to be chained to a corporate entity).

I work to live - I don't live to work. As hordes of clueless MBA's have had 20 years to surgically remove all the fun and creativity out of corporate IT, I have decided that I prefer to take the route that enables me to be *truly* free once I'm 40.

Re:Nice approach

[somersault]

The first hacker to take down their network, either internal or external facing, would be infamous. He'd also be killed in less than 24 hours by an army of angry geeks who want their porn back