
Things I've learned at Google so far - btilly
http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2010/01/things-ive-learned-at-google.html
======
neilk
Hi there. I was a Noogler in 2005 or so, but it sounds like things haven't
changed much, at least on that side.

Regarding the stuff you're not supposed to talk about, there are three stages:

1\. Amazement at how it all works; wanting to go run and tell all your
friends.

2\. Fear that talking about Google's advantages would undermine the company
(or your position in it)

3\. Recognition that nobody would believe you anyway.

By the time you've reached (3) you've come to believe that Google is years
ahead of anyone else; you've transferred all loyalties to the company; you
accept the idea that you're in an elite of humanity.

The reality is that while Googlers are very smart, and sometimes not even
narrow, a lot of their intellectual qualities are not innate. Mostly it's due
to a very severe work ethic and having had the leisure and wealth to pursue a
field with single-minded focus since they were in their early teens. And much
of this is mere bravado, or habitual oneupmanship learned from Ivy-league
American schools. Don't be intimidated, and try not to abandon all your own
intellectual standards in favor of Google's.

~~~
amichail
Do you think entrepreneurs would be happy there? After all, many compelling
ideas would not fair well with Google's data-driven evaluation (at least in
the short term).

~~~
nostrademons
There are a bunch of ex-entrepreneurs there, including myself. I think their
happiness and success depends upon whether their entrepreneurial ideas align
with the sorts of projects that Google would be good at, or whether they're
better off striking out on their own again.

~~~
jlees
And even if you itch to strike out on your own, google is a great place to
learn a lot of crazy stuff from a lot of crazy smart people-that's certainly a
big part of why i'm here.

------
logicalmind
One thing I'd like to know about is how google deals with declines in
productivity. Undoubtedly, their hiring process gets them highly qualified
individuals, at least initially. But over time, there has to be people who
become lazy and take advantage of their good graces. And it would be expected
that as people age they start a family and their work priorities may take a
back seat.

Is there some kind of process, ala Jack Welch, where people are ranked and the
bottom 10% are removed? How does google deal with under-performers?

~~~
nostrademons
It's the same as pretty much any big company - underperformers are notified
that they're underperforming, put on a performance improvement plan to help
improve their performance, and if they still don't improve, they're fired.

There're no quotas for removing people (good riddance, the "fire the bottom
10%" school of management always struck me as the best way to create a
poisonous, stressful company culture). But it's usually blatantly obvious who
the underperformers are...they're the folks who haven't accomplished anything
over the last 6 months...

~~~
marltod
Google has it easy in this respect. At many other companies it can be hard to
know if people are slacking off or just not that smart.

~~~
roundsquare
To be honest, what difference does it make? It may sound cruel, but why not
just fire someone if they are not performing (given adequate time to improve,
etc...).

Please treat this as a genuine question - as someone who has only started
working a few years ago and never had a management position, I feel my view is
correct but am open to learning if/why I'm wrong.

~~~
marltod
You are correct. It doesn't matter, if someone is getting nothing done you can
fire them unless their performance is due to a medical issue. I was referring
to the people who get very little done.

Other companies would love to hire only Google caliber employees but there
isn't enough people to hire. So you end up with a company that may have a few
superstars and a lot of average programmers. If a superstar slacked off they
would have the same productivity as the average coders. It is hard for a
manager to complain to that superstar when his productivity is just as good as
many of his peers. At Google the slacker would stand out because his peers are
all superstars and get A LOT done.

------
petercooper
_Google has amazing people. It is often said that engineers find working at
Google a humbling experience. This is absolutely true. It took me less than a
day to realize that the guy sitting next to me is clearly much smarter than I
am [..] without false modesty I wouldn't be surprised to find that I'm as high
as being in the top 0.1% in general intelligence (however that could be
measured)._

This strikes me as a problem, rather than an achievement. Google seems to be
jam packed with highly intelligent eggheads, but Google isn't a pure science
company - they're trying to work with consumers too. Most of the most
successful businessmen and entrepreneurs I know don't come even close to the
top 1% of intelligence (and are often even dyslexic) as they need a wider
range of faculties like common-sense, charisma, creativity, and "emotional
intelligence."

Maybe this guy's in the engineering department and Google _does_ hire a lot of
creatives, business types, and what not, but their products have a rather
sterile edge that makes me think the engineers always win over there..

~~~
neilk
Google believes in data _only_. Designers are not used to justifying their
ideas with data.

While no one comes out and says it, the implication is that most of what
constitutes the design profession is mere flimflammery. You don't need a
designer to tell you what shade of blue to pick when you can just A/B test a
few hundred shades.

That's why a lot of designers quit.

~~~
dirtyaura
Bullshit. For example, do you honestly think that Android UI was done in a
data-driven way from the scratch without designers?

Google uses data to tweak experience of their existing products like Search
UI. That's it. Designing interfaces for new products or features is done by
designers (or in some case, like many Google Labs products, by developers).

~~~
neilk
You're right, I should have qualified that. That said, there are a lot of
people working as designers in Google, but in my experience they are
essentially user interaction designers.

The more woolly aspects of design -- like picking a different font just
because of how it "feels" -- Google's pretty hostile to that. There's a
default concept of "Googliness" which everyone understands to be a kind of
high-energy, primary-color blandness with near-magical UI. There aren't a lot
of projects that deviate from that, no matter what the designer thinks.

If you compare it to the kind of design variety you see at Yahoo or even
Microsoft you'll see what I mean. At Yahoo a lot of projects are almost led by
design, for good (Flickr) or ill (almost everything else). And there are
design principles of Flickr which Google could _never_ accept, like
"serendipity". The idea that a user interface could be deliberately not laser-
efficient, in the name of promoting exploration and community engagement,
would totally baffle Google managers and they wouldn't tolerate that kind of
designer-talk.

~~~
jlees
Heaven forfend one should use an attractive font on a Google product.

Seeing the incredible engineering innovations going on at Google, and the
incredible UI innovations going on elsewhere, makes me a little sad - never
the twain shall meet, and instead they're redeemed to making shallow copies of
each other and never quite hitting the spot. Over-designed and under-
engineered, or vice versa.

Adding design-led products or hiring more designers, however, would kind of
change what Google is about IMO. Can engineers be taught design? ;)

~~~
krakensden
Have you ever considered that maybe designers have created a culture that is
not quite congruent with reality, and that their perception of a good
interface is not, in fact, always a good interface?

Engineers like the Google style, but so do lots of my acquaintances who are
non-engineers, from scientists to writers to school teachers.

Designers seem to be the only demographic with a problem.

~~~
elblanco
Designer driven applications and websites seem to too often fall into the
"pretty but unusable" bucket, I agree.

------
gyardley
While I enjoyed the article, and I appreciate you posting it, one quibble:
it's off-putting whenever anyone mentions a number they got on a test as
evidence for intelligence. If you write intelligently, I'll happily consider
you intelligent.

~~~
btilly
I normally don't do that. However for perspective I really wanted to give an
idea of how intelligent I consider myself to be, and giving that relatively
objective number sounded like the least assholish way I had to convey that to
people who don't know me.

You'll note that immediately upon giving the number I pointed out that there
are issues with that method of measurement and gave an honest self-assessment
whose upper range was well below what the number said.

~~~
elblanco
I'm surprised you don't know your own IQ score. I couldn't even make it to
middle-school without having undergone a battery of at least a half-dozen IQ
and aptitude evaluations. By the time I made it out of High School I knew
probably more than any person should know about their own intelligence and had
a pretty clear idea of the range my IQ would fall into as well as my learning
styles, cognitive strengths and weaknesses, perceptual processes, learning
disabilities, talents and gifts and aptitude scores on at least 3 standardized
exams, and various other cognitive measures.

And I went to Public School.

~~~
btilly
Where I grew up in Canada we didn't bother with all of that.

The SATs and GREs are the only standardized tests I've taken. And I only took
those because I was considering going to US schools.

If you're curious, on the SATs I got 1300. (For the younger people in the
audience, the SATs were rescaled, that score was a lot better then than it
would be now.) I believe that I'd have done better if I wasn't sick that day.
Having to get up between sections to go vomit in the bathroom is not exactly
good for your concentration...

~~~
elblanco
It may sound crazy after my previous comment, but I never took the SATs or
GREs, GMATs etc. I managed to slip through schooling using a couple loopholes
and skip the entrance exams all the way to my M.S.

------
aresant
"You are expected to. . . solve problems . . . Usually by email. The result is
an organization which is in a constant state of flux . . . With . . . very
large volumes of email."

So now we understand Google Wave - they built it for themselves!

~~~
Dove
I always assumed that was the case. Feel the same way about Office.

------
jff
As my boss likes to say, they have the free meals because they expect you to
be there for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

~~~
durin42
Ha! I've visited Mountain View enough to know that it's a ghost town when
breakfast is actually being served.

~~~
jlees
It's not actually that bad >.> I was pleasantly surprised by the number of
other people around at 8.30am!

------
RyanMcGreal
>Cats are different, however. Nothing against cats, but Google is a dog place
and cats wouldn't be comfortable.

Reminded me of this:

[http://www.rhymeswithorange.com/2008/09/take-your-cat-to-
wor...](http://www.rhymeswithorange.com/2008/09/take-your-cat-to-work-day/)

------
johnyzee
I am blown away by some of the stuff Google puts out, I can only imagine what
their internal technologies and tools must look like.

To me, that more than anything validates their approach to hiring, development
and business strategy, of which I would otherwise be very sceptical.

I'd never get hired at Google, and rightly so; I look at some of their stuff
and know that I could never do that. I used to think (not without some
scornful resentment) that they were elitist snobs, but you just can't argue
with their results.

~~~
elblanco
I think that you can. To date, Google really only has one successful product
(success meaning "makes money for Google") and that's Ad-sense.

Sure it's wildly successful. But if that stopped making money for Google
tomorrow (for example, I automatically mentally filter out all advertisements
in my search results, how long before everybody does that), what would their
revenue and profitability picture look like? In almost every other product
area outside of web search and _perhaps_ email, where Google competes against
another company, they haven't done well at all -- both in terms of users and
in terms of dollars.

In other words, Google's first product, designed by a couple of grad students,
is the loss leader that drives people to their one and only money making
product that supplies 99% (not 30%, or 60% or even 80%, 99%!) of their
operating capital.

~~~
nostrademons
AdWords, not AdSense. AdSense is their _second_ successful product.

And Search exists basically to supply inventory for AdWords. They wouldn't
have anything to run ads on without search (okay, not quite true, there's
AdSense, but they wouldn't have developed either...)

~~~
elblanco
Thanks for the correction.

But yeah, that merely proves my point. If click-throughs started to drop, what
other money making products does Google have in its portfolio?

(don't get me wrong, I love and use Google products as much as the next fella,
but I also understand that their search/ad revenue is what's subsidizing my
use of Google Earth or Picassa or whatever)

~~~
nostrademons
There're some, but if they're not in the 10-K I'm not allowed to comment on
the profitability of other products.

~~~
elblanco
Well, it's not hard to just go through the list of products Google offers, and
subtract the ones that don't have a business model around them.

For example, Google Earth does some actual business business, and probably
makes a bit of cash selling pro versions and geospatial servers and services
(haven't looked at the 10-k to be honest). Orkut, Sites, Knol, Chat, Wave,
Scholar, etc. does not.

Some things like SketchUp are designed as loss leaders like Search to provide
content to things that might have a decent revenue stream like Google Earth
(except most of the paying users are probably not using the Sketchup Data).

But other, more expensive things like Chrome and Android have a link to making
money that's very tenuous at best.

And we also already know that Search Ads account for 99% of Google's revenue
stream. Subtract that out and we have a very good idea of where Google's other
offerings are.

------
elblanco
It's kinda like an organization designed around the pinnacle of Maslow's
Hierarchy of needs.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslows_hierarchy_of_needs>

~~~
mixmax
Sex and sexual intimacy seem to be sorely lacking from their organizational
chart.

~~~
ovi256
If it provides those too, it's called a cult, not a corporation.

------
waterlesscloud
Here's a question, and I don't mean this in a snarky way at all. It's a
genuine question.

With all these smart people, why has the experience of google search not
improved substantially over the last 10 years? Sure, there's more little
geegaws in search now, but the experience of finding what I want hasn't gotten
any easier.

~~~
nostrademons
What are some of the tasks you've had a bad experience with?

I work in Google Search, and we actively try to identify areas that people are
having difficulty with and then come up with ways to make their search
experience better. Unfortunately, most of the low-hanging fruit has already
been picked. If we knew precisely where the pain points were, we'd be much
better able to solve them.

~~~
_delirium
One big annoyance: 10 years ago, when I searched for a snippet of song lyrics,
I got a fan site for the band that accurately transcribed the lyrics. Now I
get nothing but pages and pages of shady sites selling me ringtones, with
inaccurate lyrics, even when I know there are fansites for the band with
better lyrics.

A guess is that this is the result of the reliance on domain names for
ranking. The high-quality lyrics are distributed across millions of separate
domain names, since fansites typically are dedicated to only one band. The
low-quality, ring-tones-heavy lyrics sites, though, are centralized, with
every band's lyrics on the same domain.

~~~
_delirium
As a bit of a followup: an even worse case (i.e. less likely to get a nice,
fan-created lyrics page as one of the first-page hits) is when I know the name
of the song and google for something like: joy division warsaw lyrics.

Expected result is something like:
<http://www.joydiv.org/shadowplay/joyd/warsaw.html>

What I actually get are a bunch of sites with names like mp3lyrics,
songlyrics, musicsonglyrics. It might be that the word "lyrics" in my query is
boosting that sort of stuff to the top? From what I can tell, Google also
penalizes old / rarely updated sites, which probably hurts these kinds of
pages--- the page linked above was last updated in 2007, but it's still the
best result for that query.

------
dschobel
_This leads to another point of interest. How astoundingly complex the company
is. I believe that organizations naturally evolve until they are as complex as
the people in them can handle. Well Google is tackling really big, complex
problems, and is full of people who can handle a lot of complexity._

What do you mean the company is complex?

It's not clear to me why solving difficult problems merits organizational or
operational complexity.

~~~
btilly
Try to build something that deals with the amount of data that Google has, as
quickly as Google handles it, with everything distributed, replicated, load
balanced, and with failover to keep the site up when bad things happen
anywhere in the system. (Which happens more often than we would like.)

Before you're done you'll have built a lot of pieces of software that do
different things that have complex little dependencies on each other.

Now iterate that through many generations of development, and build some other
systems that tackle similar problems.

Do that and you'll discover why Google's infrastructure is complex.

~~~
elblanco
Quick, slightly off-topic question. There's a belief in the industry (I think
wrongly) that pretty much the only way to build big complex systems, you need
a central "Enterprise Architect" to model all the business processes and use
those to drive down to the technology.

As somebody external to Google, it seems to me that this approach largely does
not exist at Google (or if it does, it exists only for particular isolated
pieces). Is this true? Or rather? What's Google's method for containing,
directing and handling this complexity if it's not a traditional EA thinking
process?

~~~
btilly
Excellent question.

I don't think I'm supposed to answer it.

However Google's answer would be part of the, "nobody would believe me" piece
of neilk's top-rated comment.

~~~
elblanco
Thanks for entertaining it. Your answer is already pretty informative.

------
ojbyrne
So I'm generally fine with Google as a great company until I deal with SEO
people (i.e. the recent Mahalo discussion here). If you're all so great, why
do we have to deal with so much pollution on the web?

~~~
nostrademons
What are the combined resources thrown at gaming Google's search results? What
are the combined resources thrown at preventing people from gaming Google's
search results? The webspam team is big and staffed with some incredibly
intelligent people, but there are probably _millions_ of people out there that
are all trying to figure out how to rank highly in search results.

~~~
ojbyrne
It's a reasonable counter-argument, but I don't buy it.

1\. All those millions of people are competing against each other - many of
them will cancel each other out.

2\. It doesn't seem at all like google can't control spam, but that given
well-funded companies (ideally from California) they look the other way. It
seems less like a lack of resources and more like a lack of integrity.

------
waivej
This article really made me want to go work for Google. Is it possible to get
tours and meet real employees?

~~~
btilly
I have no idea about official tours. I rather doubt it though. It is a work
place, not a theme park.

However if you happen to know someone there, they have the freedom to meet you
on campus and show you around all they like.

------
mattiss
I mean this is interesting and all, but first page? Really? Does everybody
want to work at Google that badly?

~~~
mncaudill
Speaking for myself, yes and yes.

It's a fairly interesting view from someone just starting out in a company
that has an almost mystical appeal.

~~~
mattiss
Weird. I thought this board was about entrepreneurship?

~~~
donaq
It's not called "Hacker News" for nothing. :)

------
csomar
In fact this is enshrined as an official corporate policy - engineers get 20%
of their time to do with pretty much as they please, and are judged in part on
how they use that time. I found a speech claiming that over half of Google's
applications started as a 20% project.

>> (I'm surprised that the figure is so low.)

I wonder why you are surprised? Actually it's very high. Imagine Google don't
offer 20% for its' employees, will their productivity (in their real jobs)
increase? Probably not, you won't work 100% of your time, you'll work 70% or
80% in best cases.

Google profit from this wasted 20% to turn it into useful mini-applications,
that can turn big in the future and the best example is Gmail.

~~~
neilk
Virtually no Google engineers use their personal time to develop new projects.
In most cases, they have crushing responsibilities on their existing projects
(that guy who appears to be 2x as smart as you and sits next to you? You are
competing with him).

Usually, people use the official personal time to take mini-sabbaticals with
other projects, or write tools to make their own lives easier (which may have
more general use within the company, or beyond.)

~~~
nostrademons
"Virtually no Google engineers use their personal time to develop new
projects."

I've tried, without success so far, though I've got a bunch of things in the
half-done state that could turn into something useful eventually. It is _very_
hard, kinda like starting up a company while keeping your day job.

I've found I had the most success by just trying to get my 80% project out of
the way as fast as possible, doing as much as needed to keep my teammates
happy, and then banking the remaining time to work on 20% projects. It's best
used in chunks of a week or so, so that you can actually finish a lot and have
something concrete that can sit and wait for your next big chunk of time.

------
elblanco
So Google is hiring?

I only ever hear about the intense scrutiny engineers have to go through (and
various quasi-discriminatory practices regarding school pedigree), but say I'm
past the "I want to be an engineer" phase of my life and now work squarely in
management.

What's the process for that?

------
danbmil99
To listen to Googlers, Google is the frakking Chuck Norris of tech companies.

~~~
GeorgeTirebiter
I'm not quite so sure that's an apt analogy. For instance, Chuck does not
believe in evolution and subscribes to intelligent design.

More about him at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris>

------
ajaypopat
A question for googlers: what's the work-life balance like working over there?
If you've worked at any of the other top tech companies, is it any
better/worse than your previous gig?

------
sown
i wish i was smart enough to work at google. :(

------
eleitl
That blog post makes we want to punch the author in the face. Repeatedly.

------
lispm
Funny that all these super intelligent people at Google don't understand the
need for 'privacy'. Even their boss' public statements about this issue seem
to be pretty dumb.

~~~
lispm
so who is downvoting this? People from Google or the NSA?

~~~
simonk
Paranoid a little? It was most likely downvoted because it has nothing to do
with the article and was see as trolling.

~~~
codexon
It is marginally related to the article, both being about Google. It isn't
fair to say that he was trolling just because half of his comment wasn't
discussed in the blog post.

~~~
lispm
my point is that these people who think their are intelligent, in fact are
missing lots of facets from what we call 'intelligence'. From my point of view
Google's employees are understanding a lot about technology and little about
its social impact. It would help if they would not present them as super smart
and act so clueless in so many ways.

------
ThinkWriteMute
I like Google as a company and I love their products (As much as you can love
a tool), but jesus how can he work there _and_ use Blogger? It's such a piece
of crap.

~~~
csomar
What's wrong with Blogger? It does its' job well.

What's the point from Blogging? -> Getting the word to the others. and it does
it well, so it's not crap.

~~~
ThinkWriteMute
If getting it done was the only objective then why isn't Blogger just a web
server that people can FTP self written HTML files to?

Blogger has a lot of paper cuts that slowly make it either unbearable to use
or unsightly to visit.

It takes me 4 refreshes just to comment on a page.

~~~
fexl
I know what you mean, sometimes things can get a little flaky. I haven't tried
the comment feature yet. It is after all a big pile of Javascript with WYSIWYG
editors and such. So far I have found the bugs slightly annoying, cute, and
avoidable.

For my own high-powered purposes I've written a completely custom CMS with
fully encrypted and extensible object types based on pure text. But have I
written an "object" with a WYSIWYG editor, Labels, Archives, and other stuff
built in yet? Heck no. So blogger.com here I come.

------
gritzko
Blah-blah, Google is so cool, nothing worth reading, actually.

~~~
btilly
Let's see.

I offered advice on gmail that solves complaints I have heard about it in the
past from heavy email users. I described a scene of perpetual chaos that
plenty of people would hate. And I gave the piece of information that Google
is hiring.

Those are three pieces of information that I thought were worthwhile sharing
which are definitely _not_ simply "Google is cool".

~~~
mrduncan
I thought there were some really interesting tidbits in there and I enjoyed
reading about the office environment. About the information that they're
hiring - has there ever been a time when Google wasn't hiring? (I mean that
seriously, not to be snarky.)

~~~
btilly
About a year ago Google had a layoff and stopped hiring.

This was personally frustrating, because I got through the interview process
in Feb, got approved by the hiring committee, then headcount was not approved.
Which put me in a state of indefinite limbo. So I had found a different job by
the time they contacted me again in October.

~~~
psranga
Did you have to interview again in October, or did they just reactivate your
previous offer?

~~~
btilly
I wound up in a very different position from what I'd applied for, so they did
a phone interview with my potential manager to decide whether I needed to come
in for another on site interview.

