Journalists and a good number of non-programmer types always seem to focus purely on the surface perks of Google and always miss the real reason it is a good place to work.
The culture, the people, and the company are focused completely on providing an environment where brains and hard work pay off. Smart people always want to be around people smarter then them, to me that is a hallmark of intelligence. Working at Google you are guaranteed to be working with or around several of the smartest people in the industry.
Furthermore the practices of engineering and product development do not work like a standard corporate software shop. I mean just reading this article from Steve http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile... is likely to get your mouth watering if you are a Software Guy, especially if you are into the sort of startup scene.
The point is if all the food went away, the naps, the pools, the perks and all that was left was the engineering structure I would still want to work there if only to be around the smart people and to avoid(they are everywhere) the politics of corporate software development.*
> The point is if all the food went away, the naps, the pools, the perks ...
But, of course, that engineering culture would inherently earn obscene amounts of money and re-invest that money in its talent, thus re-introducing the perks. They're just an emergent behavior of Google-like companies.
The culture, the people, and the company are focused completely on providing an environment where brains and hard work pay off. Smart people always want to be around people smarter then them, to me that is a hallmark of intelligence. Working at Google you are guaranteed to be working with or around several of the smartest people in the industry. Furthermore the practices of engineering and product development do not work like a standard corporate software shop. I mean just reading this article from Steve http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile... is likely to get your mouth watering if you are a Software Guy, especially if you are into the sort of startup scene.
The point is if all the food went away, the naps, the pools, the perks and all that was left was the engineering structure I would still want to work there if only to be around the smart people and to avoid(they are everywhere) the politics of corporate software development.*
*Several parallels to startups here.