Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Google from the inside
Mark Jen recently started working at Google. He previously worked at Microsoft and interned at IBM. He's got a blog called ninetyninezeros. I'm not sure where the name comes from — maybe from a Google which is 10100? No, that's one hundred zeros. One followed by ninety-nine zeros is a duotrigintillion. But I digress.
Mark is using his blog to document his experience as a new Google employee (aka noogler). He's pretty open about the good and bad. He got into some minor trouble when he disclosed a bit too much about a presentation that contained financial-related info. But there's no "Google blogger fired" story here.
Some of the benefits that Google makes available to employees are pretty amazing. For example:
This reminds me of a benefit that we had at Iris. A concierge and personal assistance service called Circles. Circles was a great perk but, really, the intent was to keep you at work. Someone once joked "Gee, can I get Circles to go to my house and play with my kids?" Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing creative benefits to improve productivity and morale. And these benefits cost real money so it's hard to complain when a company wants to spend more money to keep you happy. But there's also that work/family balance that becomes harder to achieve when you spend an inordinate amount of your time working.
Mark is using his blog to document his experience as a new Google employee (aka noogler). He's pretty open about the good and bad. He got into some minor trouble when he disclosed a bit too much about a presentation that contained financial-related info. But there's no "Google blogger fired" story here.
Some of the benefits that Google makes available to employees are pretty amazing. For example:
Mark does note that a lot of the benefits could be viewed as thinly veiled timesavers to keep you at work. Free lunch, free dinner, on-site doctor, on-site dentist, on-site car washes, etc. Every benefit is on-site so that you never leave work. It's hard to complain about great perks like this but there is an underlying corporate motivation.For employees who want to live in San Francisco: a free shuttle. Not only is the shuttle free, but during your commute, you can connect onto the internet and do work. Somehow, they have a high speed wireless internet uplink on the bus which is shared to the passengers via a wireless router. As you can imagine, this is pretty nice because you can actually get work done while you're commuting; thus, further increasing your productivity. This shuttle is so popular that they actually use full size charter buses which seat about 50 people and they run 6 times to Google in the morning and 6 times back to San Francisco in the evening.
This reminds me of a benefit that we had at Iris. A concierge and personal assistance service called Circles. Circles was a great perk but, really, the intent was to keep you at work. Someone once joked "Gee, can I get Circles to go to my house and play with my kids?" Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing creative benefits to improve productivity and morale. And these benefits cost real money so it's hard to complain when a company wants to spend more money to keep you happy. But there's also that work/family balance that becomes harder to achieve when you spend an inordinate amount of your time working.
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