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How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)

aaronsw.com

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Re: How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)

#11

Post by derwiki »

pcvarmint wrote: post #5

I thought it looked creepy, like an adult daycare center. I was approached twice and interviewed twice by Google but I don't think I'd fit that culture. No offices -- just open spaces. A meritocracy where you are evaluated by your peers generally, rather than by a boss or customer for your merits in a particular job. Where you don't even know what you will be working on until you're hired, as if that gives you a choi…

I'm surprised at how polarizing no offices vs open offices is. My first job at IBM, I had an office with two co-workers. They were great, but on days they were out it was sooo isolating. When I quit and took a job at a start up in SF with an open office plan, I loved it immediately. I could look across the room and see if the systems guy was there or getting coffee, instead of pinging into the Sametime void.

So, I'm clearly on the open office side of the camp. What are the main arguments for offices? Peace and quiet and the ability to focus?

Re: How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)

#12

Post by pgbovine »

pcvarmint wrote: post #5

I thought it looked creepy, like an adult daycare center. I was approached twice and interviewed twice by Google but I don't think I'd fit that culture. No offices -- just open spaces. A meritocracy where you are evaluated by your peers generally, rather than by a boss or customer for your merits in a particular job. Where you don't even know what you will be working on until you're hired, as if that gives you a choi…

No offices -- just open spaces. not true; plenty of offices around perimeters.

Too academic (from Stanford days?) for my tastes. also untrue; googlers are mostly evaluated on quantifiable impact on products, not by their academic research publications. they are explicitly not an academic lab. for details, see:

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

Re: How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)

#13

Post by hawkharris »

Right after college, I was enticed by these perks: free food, laundry services, etc. After a few years in industry, I became more interested in the less sexy but more substantive benefits like a competitive salary, a 401K and good medical coverage.

College-like perks and grown-up perks are not always mutually exclusive. My understanding is that Google pays developers well and offers great benefits.

However, my experience has been that some tech companies emphasize their college-like benefits in lieu of providing strong adult benefits. "Stock options? Who needs stock options when you have beanbag chairs?"

If a company is going to play up its college-like perks, it should also bring to the table substantive financial and health-related benefits. Otherwise I can see how it would be difficult to retain young developers as their priorities change.

Re: How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)

#14

Post by amaks »

ex-googler1 wrote: post #8
jacob019 wrote: post #4

read this before noticing it was written in 2006 by Aaron Schwartz. That certainly colors the perspective. I wonder how much has changed.

not much. i quit a few months ago and so happy to be out of that insane place. they compare your work against your coworkers, so its constant competition, even if you meet your "goals". they also have zero work/life balance. all that free food and google shuttles wear off after a couple of months. then their non-stop work life settles in and you realize you made a horrible decision by accepting the job offer. the onl…

Apparently you haven't worked for Microsoft. Google is engineer's heaven compared to MS.

Re: How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)

#15

Post by luu »

Funny, my experience is the opposite on literally every concrete assertion about people and motivations.

Looking at my team, and the broader team under my director, only one was hired "straight out of college". Well, if you consider fresh PhDs to be "straight out of college", there are a few, but I doubt Aaron meant folks approaching 30 with kids on the horizon when he was talking about people just out of college.

Perhaps a couple are cynical, but I wouldn't call any childish or enthusiastically adolescent, which isn't too surprising, considering that the median employee within two levels of management of me is mid-thirties with two kids.

We have a couple of visiting scientists (professors at major research universities), and they were surprised by what we're doing, so perhaps the secrecy doesn't do such a bad job of keeping things inside the company after all.

I don't doubt Aaron's experience, but it's exactly what you'd expect due to selection bias. How old was Aaron when he wrote that, 20? He probably wasn't hanging out with the median person from my team. There's nothing wrong with that. But, all things considered, that essay contains a lot of awfully strong assertions.

Re: How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)

#16

Post by amaks »

ex-googler1 wrote: post #8
jacob019 wrote: post #4

read this before noticing it was written in 2006 by Aaron Schwartz. That certainly colors the perspective. I wonder how much has changed.

not much. i quit a few months ago and so happy to be out of that insane place. they compare your work against your coworkers, so its constant competition, even if you meet your "goals". they also have zero work/life balance. all that free food and google shuttles wear off after a couple of months. then their non-stop work life settles in and you realize you made a horrible decision by accepting the job offer. the onl…

AFAIK, Google doesn't have stock options. I don't think you worked for Google.

Re: How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)

#17

Post by raldi »

A month earlier, Aaron wrote about his experiences working in a more traditional kind of office:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/officespace

> Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first day I showed up here, I simply couldn’t take it. By lunch time I had literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying.

So I'm not sure what kind of office would have ever met his approval.

Re: How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)

#18

Post by 10098 »

derwiki wrote: post #11
pcvarmint wrote: post #5

I thought it looked creepy, like an adult daycare center. I was approached twice and interviewed twice by Google but I don't think I'd fit that culture. No offices -- just open spaces. A meritocracy where you are evaluated by your peers generally, rather than by a boss or customer for your merits in a particular job. Where you don't even know what you will be working on until you're hired, as if that gives you a choi…

I'm surprised at how polarizing no offices vs open offices is. My first job at IBM, I had an office with two co-workers. They were great, but on days they were out it was sooo isolating. When I quit and took a job at a start up in SF with an open office plan, I loved it immediately. I could look across the room and see if the systems guy was there or getting coffee, instead of pinging into the Sametime void. So, I'm…

I've worked in open-space offices most of my career and I hate it a lot. When I'm debugging or writing new code, I need concentration.

Open space takes it away. There's too much going on. Someone might be talking to someone else. People might just be moving around. And if you desk is in the proximity of the kitchen (mine once was), you're screwed because you're definitely not getting any concentration with all the chatter that usually goes on around the kitchen table. Yeah, sometimes you can block the noise out by putting on headphones and playing some repetitive techno/trance, but sometimes even music can get distracting.

The supposed benefit of open space is that if you have a question, you can just go and ask that person. But we have IM for that. Not to mention the fact that when you're asking the question personally, they have to stop whatever they are doing and answer straight away. That, by the way, is another concentration killer.

I've come to the conclusion that my ideal working space has 2-3 people besides me in it. 4-5 is a little crowded, but OK, anything beyond 6 is bad.

Re: How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)

#19

Post by 10098 »

ex-googler1 wrote: post #8
jacob019 wrote: post #4

read this before noticing it was written in 2006 by Aaron Schwartz. That certainly colors the perspective. I wonder how much has changed.

not much. i quit a few months ago and so happy to be out of that insane place. they compare your work against your coworkers, so its constant competition, even if you meet your "goals". they also have zero work/life balance. all that free food and google shuttles wear off after a couple of months. then their non-stop work life settles in and you realize you made a horrible decision by accepting the job offer. the onl…

Try MS, that's where the real competition is :-) I've heard horror stories about how someone on the team simply has to get low performance score, and when you get a low score it's basically a signal that you're getting fired. I can't imagine how poisonous that must be.

Re: How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)

#20

Post by linux_devil »

>"People read the airbrushed versions of Google technologies in talks and academic papers and think that Google has some amazingly large computer lab with amazingly powerful technology."

Latest acquisition of "Boston Dynamics" and team working at "Google X" and other projects lead to second thought . In the end it's choice of people , we should not have say in what they should or shouldn't.

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